The impact of Big Data on Social Media Marketing

Social media was born with the intent to create remote connections between colleagues, friends and others who wanted to share knowledge and information. Even though this purpose is still prevalent in its genesis, the truth is that social media has been evolving exponentially throughout the years, becoming a powerful bi-directional communication tool between companies and clients.

Nowadays, social media allows companies to publicise their brand and products, facilitating the rapid growth of their client base while also allowing the ceaseless collection of inputs from their users, whether they are clients or not.

For that reason, each like, comment or share gives companies a better understanding of their clients and their respective behaviours, through the way in which they interact with specific types of content. This behavioural analysis and exchange of information generates a massive volume of data, which can only be stored and processed using “Big Data” technologies.

In reality, Big Data has impacted on almost every sector of our daily lives, shaping the way people communicate, work and even have fun.

In recent decades, the quantity of generated data has been growing exponentially, doubling its size every two years, potentially reaching 44 trillion gigabytes in the year 2020. The massification of the World Wide Web and the Internet of things abruptly increased the amount of generated data, equally intensifying the necessity to diminish the time it takes to transform and access that same data.

Big Data is the technological concept that encompasses a particular set of practices and tools, tackling this problem using 5 fundamental principles:

  • Volume (storing, processing and accessing vast amounts of data)
  • Variety (cross-referencing data from various sources)
  • Speed (data access, treatment and processing speed)
  • Veracity (guarantee the veracity of information)
  • Value (usefulness of the information processed)

This “new” data access method and processing power has established a new paradigm within the marketing sector. Now it’s easier to analyse and identify trends, as well as possible cause and effect relationships to apply to marketing strategies. These types of analyses have become indispensable to companies for increasing the percentage of messages that actually reach the target, resulting in the growth of their ROI (return on investment).

How do we take advantage of Big Data in a marketing strategy?

The first step is to establish a relation between non-structured data, provided by social media, and already available data, such as your clients’ details. After completing this step, it will be easier to observe and analyse your clients’ actions, thus collecting important insights that will form a solid base for your future campaigns.

Now you can outline marketing strategies focused on all the insights you’ve gathered. In other words, you are now able to design marketing campaigns anchored by content that fulfills the needs of your clients, or segmented groups of clients.

Execution time has arrived! Now you possess the most actionable content, based on your analyses, let’s discover the degree of effectiveness of your strategy.

You’ve almost certainly worked out that this is a fundamental formula to success, but reaching that sweet spot will require constant “fine-tuning”. In other words, from this point forward, your digital marketing strategy will work in cycle: the number of insights about your clients and the reach and suitability of your strategies and content are proportionately higher, which in turn implies more insights.

Social media marketing is a tool that allows a company of any dimension and in any market to better understand its clients and work out the most effective strategies to shape its offers in order to satisfy the needs of its clients.

The truth: without Big Data, none of this would have been possible!

Sílvia RaposoThe impact of Big Data on Social Media Marketing

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