Today, you can hardly find a company that doesn’t use social media.
Indeed, today you cannot ignore the effectiveness of social media marketing when it comes to building an online brand image. Not to mention how many benefits social media marketing can bring to your business.
According to the recent stats by Hootsuite:
1. 50% of the global population uses social media (about 3.8 billion people)
2. over the last year, social media users spent around 2.5 hours every day engaged in social media platforms
3. companies can reach every generation through social media, as 90.4% of millennials, 77.5% of Gen X-ers, and 48.2% or baby boomers actively use social media
As a result, companies spend billions of dollars on social media advertising to engage more social media users. This year, the expenses on social media advertising are expected to reach $43 billion, which is 20% higher than last year.
But what if we told you that you don’t really need to invest thousands of dollars in social media advertising?
There is a different, more organic way to reach your audience.
We’re talking about social data.
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A brief intro to social data
If you’re an active social media user, you encounter and also contribute social data every day.
Social data is information that users share on social platforms. This information includes any kind of feedback, from comments to likes and shares, as well as their demographical and biographical information.
A company can apply this information to run a marketing campaign on and beyond social media. And although social data has certain limitations, in that some users don’t share an equal amount of information, it is still a reliable tool in marketing campaigns.
How to apply social data to launch a successful marketing campaign?
Social data is big data. Its volume is massive, and it is updated constantly, as social media users keep contributing this information on social media.
So, let’s take a look at how you can tame this beast and apply the benefits of social data to run a successful marketing campaign.
Social data application: Audience analysis
Who’s your audience?
What niche do you want to target through social media?
If you don’t know yet, let’s take a look at how social data can help you figure it out.
We’ve mentioned that social data comes in big volumes. However, social media analytics tools mine and structure it for you. There, you can find all the information about the audience that follows each of your social media accounts. One best analytics tool is Social Pilot.
So, let’s take a look at Facebook Analytics and what social data it offers to help you determine the target audience for your marketing campaign:
At the screenshot above, you can see that on Facebook Analytics you can find all the basic demographics needed to determine the target audience for your campaign:
- genders calculated in percentage
- age
- location (country and city)
- language
Different social media platforms represent this social data differently.
On LinkedIn, for instance, besides the basic demographic data, you can also receive information about your followers’ top job functions:
You can also take a look at the list of the top industries that your followers work in:
All this social data can not only be applied to your marketing campaign in general. It can also help you choose the primary social media platform, where you will run your campaign, as well as set your content strategy for this campaign.
Social data application: Content strategy
Talking about content strategy, let’s take a look at how social data can be applied in developing a marketing campaign.
Similar to sharing demographic data, your followers also share tons of social data in the form of feedback – everything, from likes to shares and comments – Maria Fincher, a marketing specialist at Flatfy.
Social media platforms collect this feedback and extract social data from it.
As a result, you get an audience engagement analysis that looks like this:
On the screenshot above, you can see how Facebook collects social data from audience feedback. You get the information on:
1. the main content types that your audience likes the most, with the average reach rate and the average engagement rate
2. reach and engagement rates for each of your posts
If you plan on running your marketing campaign on Twitter, you can also take a look at what your audience’s main interests are:
How can this social data help?
Studying the content preferences of your audiences can help you figure out the types of content that will dominate in your marketing campaign. To make it successful and make your business’s online influence grow, you can also center the content strategy of your marketing campaign around your audience’s main interests.
Over to you
Social data is not the magic pill that will make your marketing campaign an instant success.
However, if applied correctly, it can help your marketing campaign deliver great results and make it a success.
Hopefully, our insights will help you draw as many benefits from social data as possible to run a successful marketing campaign.
