Even smaller operations can mine social media data and use those insights to build a better business.
To most of us, the unique selling point of social media is the attention it gains and the interactions it sparks. With the right strategy, many businesses have transformed that attention into revenue. But big data offers far deeper insights into customer behaviour that can help make a real difference to your marketing.
We’ve all heard the statistics about how much information the human race is generating. In 2013, 90 per cent of the information in the world had been generated within just the previous two years.
This mountain of data presents almost limitless potential to better understand patterns of customer behaviour.
The academic perspective
Science and research has taken the lead when it comes to mining insight from social media. Facebook updates, Twitter posts and more are being used in everything from combatting the spread of ISIS and its ideologies to measuring how happy a population is.
One of the most ardent adopters of social media research has been the healthcare industry. In one recent study, data scientists searched tweets from an eight-month period for mentions of asthma and found an increase of social media mentions corresponded to a rise in hospital admissions.
Future outbreaks, the researchers suggested, could be identified in real time, giving hospitals time to prepare, or even giving health authorities the means to issue warnings and preventative advice quickly.
As the lead researcher on the asthma study said, “This work paves the way to address signal extraction and prediction for other chronic conditions and goes beyond current work that mostly looks at infectious conditions.”
But even if you aren’t a government health or security agency, new and valuable intuition about customers and competitors is there for the taking.
As we continue to move away from our deskbound PCs and connect on the go, mobile data can add another dimension to the insight. Call metadata from mobile phone providers has already been used to study personal mobility, urban planning, infectious-disease, health detection, extreme situation monitoring, country development, crime and privacy issues.
Putting data to work
But how do we turn the tweets, updates and likes into actionable data cheaply and in real time to identify and target customers (and potential customers)? One way is to look beyond the hashtags and other common markers.
Say you want to open a small business in a given location. Start by doing some social media research to see if potential competitors have a strong presence in the area you’re considering.
It might prompt you to consider a different neighbourhood where your market isn’t as well served. Or, you can go deeper still. The heavy social media users who patronise that competitor might also reveal their ages, where most of them live and what else they like. Metrics analysis platforms can synthesise and reveal patterns like it, giving you an invaluable overall picture of your market while keeping individual users’ details anonymous.
If you discover a lot of your intended customer base are fans of a particular coffee shop, you might do better opening your doors close by.
Look inward
Most SMEs don’t have enough information in their systems to launch a big data effort, but you may still have enough to lay the groundwork.
Consider making your way into the field gently with an introductory round of ‘small data’. You may already have information about your customers in various contact files – anything from your iCal to Salesforce.com – and their purchasing or sales patterns in your accounting software.
Put them all together and see what patterns emerge. There are plenty of digital marketing services available to help that are well within most small business budgets.
If you’ve had the forethought to adopt cloud computing for accounts or CRM, there’s a whole industry of apps and services ready to help you connect it together to see what emerges. Many cloud providers or software integration (SI) specialists will even help you migrate legacy system or paper-based information to get there.
Digital marketer tools
The major social network providers themselves all offer analytics tools. It can be as simple as using Google Analytics on your own site to see what people are searching for that leads them to your service (social media is a common source for leads).
Just like Facebook’s Pages Insights program, Facebook Audience Insights does something similar across the whole network – delivering information like ages, location, language and more that can help you target campaigns and promotions to people who have a better chance of being interested. It’s all collected and delivered securely from within the platform and with everyone’s identity protected.
Gnip (https://www.gnip.com) – now owned by Twitter –delivers information about what people are tweeting, delivered in real time as the filters and APIs mine the service.
As well as managing all your social media posts, the power of the in-built analytics tools in a service like Hootsuite (https://hootsuite.com/dashboard) make it a clearinghouse for your entire social media engagement.
Most importantly of all, many – in fact most – of your competitors have already started on social data mining of their own. Don’t be left behind.