Data is everywhere. Every transaction and interaction your customers make helps to hone your sales and marketing strategies and bring them a better experience. When used effectively, organisations can make better decisions that ultimately lead to increased revenue, visibility or pipeline.
However, big data is in a different league. It’s so vast that storing and making sense of it has often proved difficult. In fact, IDC predicts that the world’s data will grow to 175 Zettabytes by 2025. So, it would take about 1.8 billion years for you to finish downloading that amount of data (depending on the speed of your internet provider).
But when you combine big data and social media, it can be a partnership that’s perfect for connecting with potential clients on social networks. Social media big data can power greater interactions, more focused audiences and help you to command an overall wider visibility.
What is big data?
Big data is defined by TechTarget as data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data-processing application software.
It's a combination of structured, semi structured and unstructured data that’s collected by organisations and mined for information. This is then used in a variety of projects, predictive models and other advanced analytics applications.
Big data comes from anything. This includes transaction processing systems, customer databases, documents, emails, medical records, mobile apps, images, videos, audio files and social networks.
In fact, every piece of technology you’ve used today, from your phone, laptop and apps, is connected to the world of big data. In short, big data is everything. That’s a lot of data. However, the key to success here is how you use it.
Big data in social media
In the world of social media, data just keeps on flowing. Statuses, videos, pictures, GIFs and all the rest; it adds up to galaxies of data. Believe it or not, every day we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. Bear in mind that one quintillion bytes is equal to one billion gigabytes. So that’s 2.5 billion gigabytes. Every. Single. Day.
Understanding consumers is the most important thing for businesses. With all the data points generated on social media, big data gives organisations colossal insights into the behaviour of their customers:
- What are they buying?
- What have they bought in the past?
- Which websites do they use?
- Are their habits similar to other customers?
- Can their behaviour be grouped and predicted?
Access to this kind of marketing intelligence can fuel new strategies and developments.
After all, by understanding your customer, you can identify pain points that address them and ultimately boost your company’s future growth.
Connect with potential customers using big data and social media analytics
There are a few strategies that you can implement to make the most of all this information. Using big data and social media analytics allows you to find the right audience, then give them exactly what they’re looking for.
Let’s take a look at some of these strategies here:
1. Get granular with hypertargeting
You’ve certainly felt its effects throughout social media – whether you know it or not. Hypertargeting is when businesses deliver messaging to a defined audience. This can be anything, from a demographic, geographical location, interests, how they’ve interacted on a website, etc. It ensures that organisations, like yours, can accurately target the audience you want.
For example, let's say that you’re a process automation tool provider that’s looking to run a set of separate social ads campaigns that's looking to run a targeted ad campaign for customers on the US east coast that have shown interest in your latest whitepaper over the past 2 weeks. By hypertargeting, you can build campaigns that hit the landing.
Big data is the analytics that makes the hypertargeting possible. Therefore, it has all the detailed data points that organisations focus on to drive a successful campaign.
This data can also be important for creating in-depth buyer profiles that are rich in detail and can form the backbone of your targeting strategy. It’s almost like you’re looking your perfect customer in the face...and giving them a little wink.
2. Campaign analysis
How do you know your social campaign is going to perform well? Well, you don’t. But big data can give you the next best thing. A kind of binary crystal ball, if you will. By taking data points gathered from similar campaigns and putting them all on the table, you can review how your campaign is likely to perform and make quick optimisations based on the findings.
For example, let's say that you're a mid-size FinTech startup that wants to bring in new clients. Your app helps young people to budget and take control of their finances, and you want your social posts to appear in front of 18-25 year olds who are interested in personal finance.
You set up a campaign and you're ready to launch. But there’s a problem. You check your campaign analysis and there's a slight gap in estimated performance. You analyse your ads and settings again, tweaking the audience age range to compensate for the slight dip.
All the while, the big data is working in the background to bring all the predicative analysis that you’re seeing on screen. From there, your ads, powered by the in-depth analytics of big data, can reach the clients you want to hit.
We create 2.5 billion gigabytes. Every. Single. Day.
3. Focus on buying patterns
Knowing how your customers behave is pivotal to getting the ROI that you’re looking for. Buying patterns fall into this. In fact, observing the buying patterns of your customers can often feel like a superpower. You can see where their interests are leading them, what they require and what they are planning to buy.
Predictive modelling provides insights through harnessing big data. So, all of the data points that build up these predictions come from past purchases and behaviours that have been made by many customers, or buyer personas. These thousands, millions or billions of personas are then grouped with those that have similar behaviours to allow AI to spot trends and predict future buying patterns.
We love social media big data
At Fifty Five and Five, we recognise that our clients want data-driven thinking to deliver big results. Unleashing our love for all things tech and recognising the success that comes from implementing the right solutions, we harness the power of data to transform both short- and long-term strategies.
Get in touch with our team to see how we can leverage your social media big data to help you reach your goals.
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