Big Data, Big Impact: How Data Improves Your Social Media Marketing

Since the inception of social media platforms, social media marketing has been developing along with the trend. Today, it’s one of the most effective ways for businesses to reach their target audiences. That’s why companies spend billions of dollars on social media promotion. Statista states that in 2021 the US is projected to spend $47.9 billion on social media advertising out of over 198 billion forecasted for the total media advertising spending.

Marketers are constantly searching for ways to improve their social media marketing strategies. One of them is to implement big data analysis. It allows marketers to segment customer audiences more accurately, build more effective sales funnels, and create successful advertising campaigns.

In this article, we’ll look into how big data influences social media marketing and find out which tools you can use for efficient big data analysis in media.

Big Data Has Significantly Changed the Way Businesses Market on Social Media

Big data has a significant influence on our lives and the business world. It has already changed the way businesses operate in retail, agriculture, banking, healthcare, and other industries. With the insights obtained from processing amounts of raw big data, companies enhance their business strategies and decrease their production and operational costs.

Social media platforms are no exception. Initially started as sites for connecting people and entertainment, now they are used as the resources of valuable data on potential buyers. Companies that promote their own brands gather and process the data users put in social media networks such as likes, photos, comments in forums and communities, etc.

The amount of data for the companies to work with is immense. By processing it smartly, they can build precise profiles of their customers. According to Statista, on Instagram alone users posted about 500 million active Stories daily in 2019. With all that, the number of users in social media platforms is quickly growing, reaching 79% in Western and Northern Europe and 74% in North America.

Various brands are already actively studying their target audiences and how they behave on social media platforms. This allows them to better adjust their adverts and successfully expand their customer bases. Besides that, marketers can plan and monitor marketing campaigns as well as decide on their future social media strategies. And those are just some examples of how businesses can use big data analytics in social media for the benefit of their brands.

How Can Big Data Help Social Media Marketers?

Marketers can enhance their brand campaigns and adverts using big data analysis in many ways. Let’s have a look at the key examples.

• Microtargeting

By using big data and machine learning algorithms, companies can analyze social media audiences and segment them into small groups by their age, tastes, race, gender, social standing, and others. This allows companies to advertise their products directly to the users who are interested in them. As a result, marketers increase their profits, lower advertising costs, and can create effective marketing campaigns aimed exactly at their audience.

• Enhanced decision making

With big data analysis, marketers can identify social media trends that they could use for effective decision-making. For example, they can determine which advertising or emailing campaign to start next or when to launch their discount schemes and many others.

• Real-time statistics

By utilizing various metrics and big data, marketers can track and evaluate the performance of their campaigns on social media platforms in real-time. This approach allows monitoring ROI changes and a campaign’s development and taking timely decisions on when to pause the campaign, adjust adverts, and others. Also, marketers can estimate the success of a current social media campaign by comparing its statistics to the previous ones.

• Product insights

Big data can share valuable insights on what products consumers want to buy and when they want to buy them. Besides that, by gathering product reviews and personal user feedback, brands can launch a new product line or better adjust the existing products to their customers’ demands.

• Multiple data channels

A new log-in and data synchronization technology via Google and Facebook accounts has become a widespread strategy used by many social media platforms. This way, more data has become accessible for marketers from various channels to analyze and build a complete picture of their customers.

• Data protection

As big data opens unlimited access to the personal data of every user on social media platforms, it’s essential to consider its safety. Therefore, software developers use Artificial Intelligence together with big data technology to prevent data exposure to third parties. For example, it can be facial and voice recognition, check-in notifications, two-factor authentication, and others.

• Predictive analytics

Big data allows marketers to make predictions on the success of future campaigns based on their past experiences. Moreover, computers can predict the forthcoming customer choices as they often choose similar products.

SCAND Case Study

Some companies use standardized digital solutions for social media platform analysis. Unfortunately, they may insufficiently examine the gathered data or provide irrelevant metrics for the planned campaigns. That’s why many companies turn to customized big data app development. It allows these companies to build apps that entirely meet their business needs and create marketing campaigns that greatly benefit their brands.

SCAND has more than 20 years of experience in software development, including customized apps for big data analysis. Let’s have a look at one of the cases created by the SCAND development team that involves big data technology.

The SCAND team had to develop an app that could analyze user profiles for successful targeting of online advertisement campaigns. The app had to perform a detailed analysis of users’ online behavior and provide flexible access to the required analytics.

As a result, the SCAND team has built a robust and highly functional solution that was capable to support the following features:

• big data processing;
• automated report generation;
• visual analytics in the form of charts and tables;
• a stand-alone dashboard with the key analytics;
• usage of Kafka and Hbase to gather analytics to key-value storage;
• summary views;
• data capture with the help of Cassandra;
• processing of SQL alike requests through Hive;
• targeted campaigns viewing and management.

Our expert team managed to deliver a high-quality product and hit all the project goals. They facilitated the advertising campaign navigation within the social network, making campaigns run smoothly and reach the most targeted audience.

The Future of Social Media Marketing With Big Data

Many companies are already successfully using big data solutions in their work and they help the companies to hold the competitive edge in their niches. Meanwhile, big data analytics is getting more precise and profound being combined with other cutting-edge technologies.

Here are just some examples of how big data can be used together with Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things to enhance social media marketing.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the analytical core for big data technology. It processes and systemizes the data gathered from social media users. Besides data management, AI empowers chatbots and virtual assistants that can also gather customers’ data in human-like conversations.

AI helps businesses to facilitate communication with their customers in social media, making it more effective and excluding the necessity to spend too many resources and time.

Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) can help businesses gather social media data to personalize their advertising campaigns. Some examples of IoT monitoring tools include virtual assistants on smart speakers and smartphones, RFID-based bands that provide access to certain services and gather customer data, NFT for marketing, and other devices.

Conclusion on Big Data

Companies that use big data apps for promoting their brands on social media platforms benefit from these apps in many ways. They help to launch marketing campaigns more effectively, reach target audiences, and spend less time and resources on advertising.

Big data technology is quickly developing and is expected to become even more accurate and profound. It’s possible due to non-stop experiments in combining big data with various cutting-edge technologies such as AI and IoT. Such combinations can revolutionize the world of marketing any time soon and companies with their own brands should be ready for this change.