Social Media Marketing With Big Data?

Big data, big impact: How data improves your social media marketing..

With the growing influence of big data, every small business owner and marketer has the power to revolutionize the market at their fingertips..

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Big data has left its impact on many sectors and is changing the way people work, from retail to healthcare – and marketing is no different.

While social media was started with the intention of connecting with friends remotely, its purpose seems to have changed. Social media platforms are used by brands to advertise and expand their customer base. Not only is social media an output for marketing campaigns, it has also become the input for planning future social media strategies.

From likes, comments, shares to following and followers, you can learn a lot about your consumers and their behavior, just by accessing their social media profiles. With the enormous quantity of data accessed from the social media, big data is helping brands and marketers to manage such data to get actionable insights.

With the data doubling every two years and estimated to reach over 44 trillion gigabytes by the year 2020, it is high time for all businesses, no matter small or large, to start using big data for constructive and innovative purposes, especially on social media.

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Social Media Strategies and Big Data

Big data has made marketing analytics more about the future predictions and the effects of the current strategies in the future. Predictive analysis is gaining popularity with the marketers and big data has a huge role to play in it. Not only can the marketers predict the consumer’s behavior, but they can also use the conclusions from their data analysis in various other indirect marketing methods, like split testing. The right analysis and adoption of big data will make sure that the strategy hits the target and gives a significant boost to ROI.

How To Create A Social Media Strategy With Big Data

To start, the unstructured data from the social media should be related with the structured data already available, like the customer details, to derive actionable insights with big data. From there, you can create a social media strategy based on the insights obtained. Chalk out the best possible strategy that encompasses the key factors to bring out consumer-driven results.

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With the strategy ready in hand, now is the time to create the content. Come up with content that will resonate well with your customers.

The content is crucial to determine the success of your strategy; hence it is important to spend time in drafting the content.

When the content is ready, it is time to target the customers. From the results of the analysis performed earlier, you can identify the section of consumers you need to target to get a spot-on result.

Lastly, it is the time for execution. Armed with the right content from the analysis, it is now time to check the effectiveness of the analysis and the strategy.

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When your social media strategy has been executed, analyze it, gain insights and further use it to refine the process. 

As social media strategist Neal Schaffer asks when talking about social media ROI, "Did your social media efforts, at the end of the day, affect the entire corporate bottom line, and how did it positively or negatively contribute to it?" That is the most important result to glean from the social media campaigns or strategies implemented.

Guest Authored By James Warner. James is a Business Analyst / Business Intelligence Analyst as well as Experienced programming and software developer with Excellent knowledge on Hadoop/Big data analysis, Data Warehousing/Data Staging/ETL tool, design and development, testing and deployment of software systems from development stage to production stage with giving emphasis on Object oriented paradigm. Follow James on Twitter.

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"Big data plays a key role in bringing the social media marketing to the top of all marketing techniques.

Whatever kind of marketing a company may employ, big data is playing a crucial part in each one of it.." -JamesWarner

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  Post Crafted By:

  Fred Hansen Br@nd Alchemist at  & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

YOUR Customer Aquisition Social Media?

Customer acquisition on social media -- with your own data..

At a time when the use of third-party data is under increased scrutiny, Brian Handly touts the benefits of using your own.

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In the battle for customer acquisition, data plays an important role in marketing strategy, along with a desired product and excellent creative.

There’s also the challenge of reaching a target audience where they spend most of their time, which today is within mobile apps and browsing social media.

When we look at Google, Facebook and Amazon from the perspective of an advertiser, we see that they utilize much more data for their own benefit than they make available for audience segmentation.

Amazon’s data has always been a walled garden. Their incredibly deep historical data on buying behaviors and patterns gives them a sizable advantage, leading to what many argue are cutthroat product decisions and incredibly targeted product recommendations.

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I expect Facebook will increasingly become a walled garden after overexposing and ineffectively monitoring third-party data use. By shutting down their Partner Categories program, they’re reinforcing to their advertisers that Facebook audience data is the primary source for campaign segmentation.

How to cope in such an environment?

While numerous data sources are available for targeting across most digital properties, one of the most effective ways brands can target is by bringing their existing opted-in datasets to social media.

This frequently provides a competitive advantage over the “walled gardens” of the major technology players, as your own data is typically much more relevant to your marketing efforts.

The four major sites -- Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat -- all provide advertisers the ability to create custom audiences using their own data, and in some cases to use third-party data sets.

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The workflow is similar across all sites:

--Prepare your data.

--Upload it.

--The social media sites hash and de-identify the data.

--Your data is then matched to the social media site’s user base.

--Your custom audience is created.

--And your original data file is deleted.

Typically, the most utilized datasets to match against are email addresses, identifiers/tags provided by the social media sites themselves and mobile advertising IDs. Most sites require a minimum of 1,000 records in order to create a custom audience. This is for privacy reasons (to ensure data is aggregated and no individual could be identified), and to ensure that the segment is large enough to deliver appropriately.

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The perks of using your own data

The ability to create custom audiences on social media allows advertisers to reframe many of their existing marketing tactics. They can encourage repeat visits, whether in-store or online, from existing customers, or try to win shoppers from competitive locations.

Brands without physical locations that seek to go directly to the consumer can use custom audiences to reach their market on social media as well. Most sites also allow advertisers to create “lookalike” audiences to help increase the scale of the campaign. They look for common characteristics from the audience you’ve uploaded and find similar consumers for your campaign to reach.

One final example of how you can use your own data is to drive mobile app acquisition. Building a custom audience from existing customers creates a segment with a much higher propensity to download and use a mobile app, especially when paired with appropriate incentives.

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A key component of such strategies has always been, and will continue to be, ensuring that the datasets you’re using have opted in to marketing communication and advertising. Expect to see more transparency required on behalf of the end user, especially as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into effect next month.

Aside from being able to reach a relevant audience, bringing your own data to a social media site can also result in performance improvements and cost savings. The cost savings stem from being more relevant -- in Facebook parlance, this is having a higher relevance score -- which can result in lower cost-per-click fees because you can potentially win the auction for a given impression at a lower price.

Guest Authored By Brian Handly. Brian is CEO of Reveal Mobile, possesses more than 20 years of technical, operational and executive management experience, with 18 years of that in advertising technology. Brian was co-founder and CEO of Accipiter, which was acquired by Atlas in December of 2006 followed by the $6.1 billion acquisition of Atlas by Microsoft in 2007. Before their recent acquisition, Handly served on the Board of Directors for WebAssign, and currently serves as an Operating Partner for Frontier Capital. Brian also has extensive experience as an angel investor and is an active advisor for several North Carolina technology companies. Follow Brian on Twitter.

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"Brands, advertisers and the agencies they work with have been hungry for the right data to help them reach the holy trinity of right time, right place, right person.

Using their own opted-in data sets will become an increasingly important tactic for the marketer’s overall customer acquisition strategy to achieve that goal.." -BrianHandly

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  Post Crafted By:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

Future-Proof YOUR Social Media Marketing Career?

Remember the good old days, when social media marketing was largely a creative discipline, when you could post something clever and your following would notice?

You probably scrolled through your performance metrics here and there, but mostly to see which items were most worthy of reposting or iterating—nothing too complicated there.

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A lot has changed in these dynamics over the past three or so years, though. Analytics are more sophisticated. News Feed algorithms are stingier. Tool stacks and social-friendly content formats are more diverse. Senior executives at brands are more focused on return on investment.

So, the pressure to create and execute marketing strategies backed by quantifiable evidence is landing squarely on the people in the trenches—the mid-level marketing professionals.

And we’re not just talking about referencing a few spreadsheets here and there. Today, it’s all about big data—as in, troves of information that comes at us, from multiple sources, in such large tidal waves that traditional desktop applications have difficulty processing it all. The type of thing that just a few years ago, only enterprise companies dealt with and, in those cases, was always overseen by information technology departments and dedicated analysis departments.

A recent study by Richard J. Vaughan at the University of St. Francis examined marketing job listings in the top six metro areas for marketing gigs. He found that 39 percent of the marketing jobs required big data skills—and that this number is rapidly increasing.

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What’s more, a report from McKinsey & Co. predicts that a data-savvy human-resources crisis is about to hit us. “By 2018, the U.S. alone could face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills,” the report notes, “as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts with the know-how to use the analysis of big data to make effective decisions.”

It’s time to embrace a new marketing reality. You need to learn how to work with data if you expect to remain attractive to employers into the future.

Here are the skills you’ll need, along with some tips on how to acquire them.

Know how to use data for audience segmentation and personalization

Harnessing big data and applying it toward audience segmentation and personalization can lead to new levels of profitability.

When you know how to break your social media audience down into dynamic subgroups, you’re able to engage with people using messaging that’s as relevant to their situation as possible, increasing the chances that they’ll take action. Your segment schematics can be based on any number of criteria that are most available and important to your business, such as demographics, psychographics, product use, media use or communication behaviors.

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Personalized messaging is extremely important in today’s digital landscape, especially given the trend of one-to-one messaging via social apps. Your audience expects to see content that speaks to them given the context of their specific needs. Collecting and making use of the right data points allows you to disambiguate and segment to the point where you can deliver the right messaging, to the right people, at the right times and at the right places.

Where to get started: Epsilon Marketing’s comprehensive “Journey to Truly Personalized Marketing” video presentation thoroughly covers the basics of building effective segments and using them to drive business impact via social media. Among the nuggets of wisdom here is an overview of data gathering methods and tactics for listening for triggers through real-time social media monitoring.

With the emphasis here on behavioral segmentation, there are some killer tips on narrowing down your data to find the most meaningfully impactful interactions with audience members, as well as a tutorial that breaks down how to use this data to create Facebook dynamic ads.

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Know how to use data to identify intent signals

Businesses that identify a customer’s intent to buy can gain significant competitive advantages.

Traditional methods of lead scoring involved point systems that were assigned manually using guesswork. This type of lead scoring was generally based on the most recent interactions with a given lead. But with shrewd use of your data, it’s possible to make accurate predictions earlier on in the customer journey.

Armed with the knowledge of which new leads are probably going to eventually become buyers, you can formulate and dispatch timelier and more effective marketing messaging.

Intent signals come through data sources like search queries, types of content consumed, social media engagement, site browsing behavior and interactions with apps. With the rise of paid social media content promotion and the sophisticated tools of the trade, your ability to identify and capitalize on intent signals can be a major game-changer.

The social media ad campaigns that perform the best are those that match messaging to the audience’s stage in the buyer’s journey, and audience building pixels can help a great deal with that, allowing you to build out ad-driven sales funnels.

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Has someone viewed your pricing page six times in the past month but not converted yet?

Show him or her an ad that offers a timely discount to inject some urgency into the situation. Are people watching your live “how-to” videos but aren’t opting in to your email nurture list? Offer them a free premium resource with a Facebook lead ad if they do. This type of thinking is only possible if you know how to read the intent signals you’ve already got.

Know how to create a data-driven marketing strategy

Knowing how to create (and operate within) a data-driven marketing strategy will make your resume stand out among other social media marketers. Guesswork and hunches are becoming less acceptable in the era of big data. It’s no wonder 51 percent of marketing influencers express a desire to base more of their decisions on data.

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By using big data as your compass, you can optimize your what, where, when and how you tackle social media channels. The idea here is to maximize the chances that it will drive maximum engagement interaction among growing audiences.

There are many benefits associated with viewing your holistic marketing strategies through the prism of data. It enables you to create audience-relevant messaging, to drive better customer experiences and to engineer sophisticated multichannel nurture funnels.

Where to get started: Unlike older platforms for complex data analytics, Sisense offers solutions that can be used by marketers with any level of technical knowhow. This platform makes it easy to connect data sets from any number of sources, both structured and unstructured, and it automates the data preparation, merging and mapping required for fast processing. Building dashboards and formulating queries is accomplished via an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, so there’s no coding required, and Sisense’s conversational bots make it easy to pull insights on the fly, while you’re working in Slack.

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Ready to embrace the big data reality?

Big data is undoubtedly changing the world of marketing. While creativity will always be a virtue, creatives are no longer only creatives. Nor are social media managers only responsible for posting links and keeping the conversation going. No matter your role in this current digital environment, learning how to use big data will help ensure your job security.

The key is to not become intimidated by this new marketing reality. Those who enthusiastically begin a new journey of learning will be the most sought after. So, read the latest analytics news, get absorbed in the trends, read books, take courses and familiarize yourself with data tools. As overwhelming as it might seem right now, your reward will be a more secure marketing career.

Guest Authored By Robert Mening. Robert is a web consultant who has helped more than 25,000 people start their websites. He runs the Website Setup project. Follow Robert on Twitter.

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“Big data is undoubtedly changing the world of marketing. While creativity will always be a virtue, creatives are no longer only creatives.

Nor are social media managers only responsible for posting links and keeping the conversation going.

No matter your role in this current digital environment, learning how to use big data will help ensure your job security.." -Robert Mening

• 

  Authored by:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBr@nd.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)