Social media platforms are becoming an increasingly important way to interact and engage with people, such as customers of a business. Both customers and businesses can benefit from an increase in the number of opportunities to engage through the use of social media. In particular, the benefits of engaging are particularly pronounced when a customer attends an event at the physical, geographic location of a business or event. The ability to recognize the customer's physical presence and engage with the customer in real time, can be used to enhance the customer's experience at the location, and thus is extremely valuable.
However, some techniques for determining the presence of a customer at a physical location using social media are extremely limited in their ability to effectively determine relevant location information, particularly in real time. For example, some existing techniques rely solely on social media posts with geotagged physical locations in order to determine social media activity by customers that are physically present at a location. However, techniques that rely solely on geotagged social media posts can miss the vast majority (e.g., up to about 95%) of social media activity relating to the geographic location of interest.