How Big Data Can Help to Analyze Social Media Performance

During the last decade, social networking sites/apps have become the most important channels of communication.

Social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram contain a considerable amount of informative data not only about social matters but also about business and marketing.

Of course, if you want to take advantage of this ever-changing space to swing the balance in your brand’s favor, you don’t have a choice unless using big data analytics.

In this post, I’m going to describe how social media can be affected by big data analytics and how businesses can make the most out of it.

What is big data?

Big data is any novel technique used to analyze a massive volume of data that is so large it is impossible to process with traditional methods.

Big data can handle both structured and unstructured data and help you tackle the problem of processing power. The main purpose of using big data techniques is finding overall patterns, trends, and connections between different variables.

This is particularly important for studying data related to human interactions and social behaviors. This is exactly where social media can be influenced by big data, especially for marketing purposes.

In fact, the huge, unstructured knowledge available on social media can’t add real value to your marketing strategy. So you need a powerful tool like big data analytics to be able to handle it.

Important data on social media

The stream of social posts, likes, mentions, shares, followers, and many other impressions can clearly prove why big data is important in social media marketing.

This is now a must for businesses to collect these tones of information in real-time and analyze it to know how well their social presence is.

In fact, every single positive interaction can add to their reputation and any negative feedback can put their efforts at stake.

Without the shadow of a doubt, social media marketing analytics, especially for big companies, can’t be impactful without big data. Therefore, many businesses are investing masses of money on big data tools to track real-time consumer behavior across social media.

To do this you will have to:

1. Collect the most related data available on social networks
2. Recognize the weight of each data on your target market
3. Convert these data into useful facts and use them in your strategies

Of course, the velocity of your data mining, the volume of the data, and also its variety is of paramount.

You’ll need to use the best data technology and analytical tools if you want to leverage big data in marketing effectively.

Also, it’s important to consider integrating various social networking sites/apps. Using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn will lead to better social interactions and the data from them can represent reality more exactly.

Advantages of big data for digital marketing

A lot of big and small companies are thinking about considerable budgets for big data analytics tools to get ahead of the competition.

Here are 5 top benefits a big data analysis approach can bring to your social media campaign:

1. Taking care of huge information sources

As a social user, you may need to process all data related to your niche that comes from mainstream channels.

Analyzing diverse channels is not an easy task and can only be done by using artificial intelligence and big data technology.

A lot of business sites allow users to sign up via Google or other main channels. So marketers can collect and analyze data about their niche customers from social networks, browser history, applications, cloud storage, etc.

2. Targeting the right audience

It’s clear that you can’t reach out to all the internet users so you have to narrow down to the most probable group of customers.

Thus, social media marketing is all about identifying your target audience. Big data technology has provided marketers with access to insightful data of users’ personal information, photos, favorites, locations, and various kinds of activities.

3. Predicting online behaviors

A big data approach can also be used for better decision-making based on previous trends. Data-based businesses are becoming incredibly efficient, as computers can predict the potential choices of customers.

In sum, the interests and habits of people can be estimated as they’re changing based on specific overall trends.

4. Managing marketing campaigns

Big data techniques enable marketers to accurately track the ROI metrics of their social media campaigns.

It will provide advertisers with insightful data into how effective a social media campaign has been or can be. Predictive analytical methods greatly help in predicting what products/services consumers want.

Tracking consumer behaviors all over social will clear many things about the effectiveness of previous campaigns.

This includes media including their engagement and reaction to online advertising. So marketers can optimize their plans for future campaigns to get a higher ROI.

5. Identifying fair prices

One of the biggest problems for marketers is to find reasonable prices for sponsored ads. A lot of different factors are affecting the prices.

For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of influencers have considerably cut their rates. So, it’s important to track the accepted costs on the internet and make arrangements accordingly.

A big data analysis on social media can be helpful to clearly know what prices your competitors or niche customers are agreeing at.

Social media strategy when using big data

If you want to make sure that your big data approach will lead to a higher ROI on social media, you need to have an efficient strategy.

Without a strategy, you don’t know what exactly you want from the unstructured data on social channels. Therefore, you’ll waste your time and money without generating considerable leads and boosting sales.

A common social media strategy usually comprise the below steps:

• Market research
• Defining SMART goals
• Identifying the audience
• Choosing the right platforms
• Generating relevant content
• Scheduling posts and establishing a social presence
• Engaging with the community
• Influencer marketing
• Analyzing the performance

This strategy should help you achieve certain goals which usually contain below items:

• Drive traffic to your site
• Get higher conversions rates
• Build brand awareness
• Make you appear like a niche leader

Additionally, you’ll need certain metrics to analyze your performance and show you how well you’re achieving these goals.

Actually, great use of a big data strategy is to help you know your social performance. You’ll be able to optimize your social techniques based on this information and make the best out of it.

Conclusion

Big data is one of the newest features of information technology and can be of great use to digital marketers. It was tried to summarize the important aspects of big data analytics in social media marketing and the benefits it can bring to your campaign. Remember to take advantage of this technology to optimize your social presence and get ahead of the marketing competition.