3 Ways Big Data and Social Media Work Together

The whole idea of big data relies on the ability to gather and sort massive amounts of diverse information. One of the key sources of such varied and diverse information is social media. From YouTube videos to tweets, users are feeding trillions of pieces of data into the cloud every day. Through big data tools, companies are understanding and predicting consumer behavior like never before. Here are three ways that social media is key to businesses’ big data efforts:

1) Identifying Trends

People love to share their opinions on social media, and copiously so.
Social data, collected and analyzed, enables you to derive larger trends about who uses your products, what customers and prospects think about your brand and products, and which larger industry trends are taking place. For example, every day, 300 million tweets are sent out. Twitter makes a large part of its income from selling packages of tweets to companies who use that data to follow national moods on products and stay up-to-date with their brands and competitors.

2) Pinpointing Problems

Social media is like a long, ongoing customer satisfaction survey. What people are saying about your brand on social media is an indicator of the health of your customer base. Who isn’t happy? Why not? Once you have the answers, you can adjust your strategy going forwards.

In addition to getting a pulse on your reputation, you can use big data and social media for quality assurance purposes. Viewing customer complaints and turnaround time at your helpdesk is one example. Another is product-related. Auto manufacturers, for example, are using social media to gauge defects on their cars.

3) Predicting Behavior

Social activity can actually be an indicator of where future profits lie. Next Big Sound, for example, is a company that uses social media to predict record sales. Its platform tracks musicians’ social media fans, the number of plays of their songs, website pageviews, comments and other sources of feedback. This information is then used to identify which bands are popular online before they begin to sell records, as well as larger trends in music consumption. Record companies and studios use this information to target their campaigns and find new bands to sign.

WiseWindow, to name another example, tracks social media sentiment in financial markets. Taken in aggregate, this sentiment can predict industry stock movements, boosting investors’ returns in the process.

Other applications of big data and social media include geolocational technologies, like having your restaurant offer a discount coupon when a prospective customer is nearby, and simplified cross-selling and upselling based on a user’s behavioral patterns. Big data as we know it today may not exclusively depend on social media, but social media is an important component, especially when it comes to understanding customers.

To learn more about how you can turn your social media data into a source of revenue, contact us here.