Getting Started
We are now living in the era of social media. Today, people are easily accessible online and prefer to connect virtually with others. Thus, most of their day-to-day activities and preferences can be known just by going through their social media profiles. This is what forms the basis of social data.
Social data can be anything publicly shared by a user which contains metadata such as the user’s location, opinion, images, videos, the language used online, biographical data, shared links, and more. The most common form of social data is Facebook posts and tags, tweets on Twitter, posts on LinkedIn, and check-ins on these platforms. It is vital for a marketer as those are the consumer insights that can help a brand to improve their product or service, understand the customers enhancing customer service and experience, increase sales
The Significance Of Social Data
Social data has great relevance, particularly for digital marketers. Various corporations use this data to understand the needs and preferences of customers and target them accordingly to increase their sales. Their entire ad campaigns are based on this data. These companies present their products before customers most likely to buy them, by assessing their interests through the data shared by them. This way the companies get new customers and also keep in touch with the existing ones.
The use of social data is not just limited to digital marketing. It can help businesses in ways unimaginable by users. It has been observed that companies that follow social data produce 5-6% higher output and are more productive than their less data-centric competitors. Social data helps a company in understanding users and then coming up with a strategy or a product that will resonate with their values and requirements. If you have already launched a product, it will give you the correct feedback depending on which you can make course corrections. This can be a real face-saver if some negative perceptions about your brand are doing the rounds.
Social data also connects a brand with its users. They can easily voice their grievances online which can be addressed instantly by the brand. The timely response helps build trust in a user and strengthens brand loyalty. The brand can even keep an eye on its competitors through social data and get to know users’ opinions about the other brands. This will help the brand to assess its own standing in the market.
Apart from its significance for businesses, social data is extremely useful in designing political campaigns. Yes, it is true! It can make or break a political party. Social media has become a very influential tool for winning an election. Voters are mobilized, polarized, and manipulated through social data to win votes. A targeted social media campaign has the power to completely overturn election results! This is how powerful social data can be.
Let’s Breakdown Social Data
Social Data provides free access for brands to leverage user data. Using these insights brands can push targeted marketing campaigns and ads to the consumers & potential audience. It also helps you to target ads in a structured way – like where and whom to target.
Refine your ads by narrowing down your target audience by language spoken, gender and age, devices used, interests, locations, and other parameters. It is the best way to not only acquire new customers but also engage with the existing customers.
Analyzing The Social Data
How should someone analyze the social data? There are 2 steps:
1️⃣ Data Collection
Firstly collect the data generated by the online users on social networking platforms to analyze them.
2️⃣ Analyzing Data
So this process works in real-time and is used to find the influence, reach, relevance to the audience, and other parameters. It’s very important to understand that whatever is relevant today to your audience might not be relevant to them tomorrow. Also, social data helps to understand the start, the quality, and the end of the viral activities. It helps brands to understand how influential certain comments or messages are by some distinctive people.
How To Gather Social Data Via Social Listening
After getting to know the significance of social data across various sectors, you must be curious to know how to gather such data and put it to good use. One of the most useful strategies is social listening. You cannot go on reading the comments of millions of users to gather social data. This is where social listening tools come in handy. Such tools gather data that is humanly not possible to gather. They listen and analyze conversations on social media. They keep track of the brand mentions and understand the concerns of users.
Social listening tools gather data from all the popular social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and the likes. These are the following metrics which are usually analyzed by these tools:
- Retweets and likes
- Direct mentions of your brand
- Follower count and growth
- Post engagement rate
- Reactions
- Video views
- Facebook page likes and followers
- Clicks on CTAs in case of YouTube videos
- The ratio of positive versus negative responses
A basic social listening solution is a necessity for each brand today since conversations have shifted online and people resort to online opinions of other users before making buying decisions. Such a solution can act as a central command center for a company observing every activity which happens around its brand and taking necessary action to handle some unforeseen situations. There are multiple platforms that provide a set of comprehensive social listening tools to companies.
Some of these tools provide free services for certain parameters. Others can be availed at reasonable prices. But, it is an investment worth making. So, brands should not try to cut costs by ignoring them.
Takeaway
Today, many companies understand the importance of leveraging social data to reach more and more customers and scale new heights. This has led to the evolution of many tools and software designed for the purpose of collecting and analyzing social data. Social data is like an untapped gold mine of user data for companies, which if tapped can give you enormous amounts of gold.
Tags: Data Analysis, Data Analytics, Digital Marketing, Digital Marketing Startegy, Social Data