Big Data is profoundly changing business functions

Big Data is the latest buzzword in the business world and its benefits are being publicized by every business professional. It is being used extensively by organizations for key business functions like marketing and it is enormously useful when it comes to social media marketing.

Social media marketing enables these companies to reach more customers which mean more customer insights. It provides vast information and generates massive data from social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and many other like never before.

Most of the businesses fail to understand that social media is a part of big data. According to industry experts, out of 90% of the data businesses use today collected in last two years, 80% of it has come from unstructured sources such as social media.

Social media data is all about how people behave, what they are doing, what they are interested in, page views, people reached, likes, shares, retweets, downloads, follows etc. Everything bit of this information counts as this information is used to depict the customer needs, wants and how businesses must deliver if they wish to stay competitive.

Social media marketing has now become the necessity for businesses. It has a 100% higher lead to conversion rate than outbound marketing. It allows businesses to design marketing strategies and make more informed marketing decisions through analytics.

Let’s look at how big data is changing social media marketing

1. Creating targeted and more personalized campaigns on social media has become easy with big data. Analysis of large social data sets reveal trends that marketers utilize for customize communications to better reflect what people are actually sharing, liking and talking about.

2. Big data is being used in Human Resource for better understanding of workforce productivity and to make better hiring and management decisions that lead to better employee engagement. Companies also advertise job openings on social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook etc. Finding the right employee is very important for any corporation and has become easy with the help of social media. 

3. With the help of social media data, predicting trends have become easy. Businesses can keep up with the customers and the competitors as well. They don’t need to rely on past data. Companies receive plenty of internal and external data which can be used to reveal patterns and insights on future behavior which leads to real relationship building.

4. Big data provides the opportunity for marketers to test their campaigns virtually. Using real-time data, virtual campaigns can be tested, revised and retested without any risks of actual in-market testing. Marketing analytics can be utilized to measure the effectiveness and overall success of the campaign once the campaign is actually launched.