- Big data has made a significant change in how all businesses operate, including social media marketing agencies.
- Social media strategies are developed based on the insights found within big data marketing analytics.
- Big data saves marketers time and money since the analytics allow for improved ad targeting.
Big data has left its impact on many sectors and is changing the way people work, from retail to healthcare, and marketing is no different.
While social media was started with the intention of connecting with friends remotely, its purpose seems to have changed. Social media platforms are used by brands to advertise and expand their customer base. Not only is social media an output for marketing campaigns, it has also become the input for planning future social media strategies.
From likes, comments, shares to following and followers, you can learn a lot about your consumers and their behavior just by accessing their social media profiles. With the enormous quantity of data accessed from social media, big data is helping brands and marketers to manage such data to get actionable insights.
With the data doubling every two years and estimated to reach over 44 trillion gigabytes by the year 2020, it is high time for all businesses, no matter small or large, to start using big data for constructive and innovative purposes, especially on social media.
Social Media Strategies and Big Data
Big data has made marketing analytics more about future predictions and the effects of the current strategies in the future. Predictive analysis is gaining popularity with the marketers and big data has a huge role to play in it.
Not only can the marketers predict the behavior of consumers, but they can also use the conclusions from their data analysis in various other indirect marketing methods, like split testing. The right analysis and adoption of big data will make sure that the strategy hits the target and gives a significant boost to ROI.
How to create a social media strategy with big data
To start, the unstructured data from social media should be related to the structured data already available, like the customer details, to derive actionable insights with big data. From there, you can create a social media strategy based on the insights obtained. Chalk out the best possible strategy that encompasses the key factors to bring out consumer-driven results.
With the strategy ready in hand, now is the time to create the content. Come up with content that will resonate well with your customers. The content is crucial to determine the success of your strategy; hence it is important to spend time drafting content.
When the content is ready, it is time to target the customers. From the results of the analysis performed earlier, you can identify the section of consumers you need to target to get a spot-on result.
Lastly, it is time for execution. Armed with the right content from the analysis, it is now time to check the effectiveness of the analysis and the strategy.
When your social media strategy has been executed, analyze it, gain insights and further use it to refine the process. As social media strategist Neal Schaffer asks when talking about social media ROI, "Did your social media efforts, at the end of the day, affect the entire corporate bottom line, and how did it positively or negatively contribute to it?" That is the most important result to glean from the social media campaigns or strategies implemented.
How can big data help social media marketers and business owners?
Big data is key for successfully managing social media marketing campaigns. Big data allows for personalization within each campaign to target new prospects. Social media marketers use the collected data to only target customers that are truly interested in their brands. The marketers avoid overspending advertising budgets on those who don't match up with their target audience.
Big data analyzes a person's social media usage. What posts are they liking and sharing? What pages are they following? This information creates a profile to tell marketers what products and services the user is most likely to be interested in.
Big data is also useful for campaign tracking purposes. The marketers look at past and current campaigns and analyze the return on investment for each. This allows the marketer to fine-tune a campaign before launch and make adjustments once the campaign does go live.
Social media post planning is another way marketers harness the power of big data. Engagement numbers allow you to see which posts the audience is interacting with and the posts that are dead on arrival.
Businesses can use big data for business planning purposes. With the collected data, it can be analyzed to determine buying trends with customers. What products and services are your client base likely to seek out next? What type of new products should you introduce into your inventory? What type of products need to be removed or reevaluated?