Due to the omnipresent and influential air that social media has about it, it’s a mandate for any organization to have an extensive and comprehensive social media strategy if it wants to live long and prosper in this highly competitive world of business.
With people nowadays highly pre-emptive in expressing their views, emotions, and opinions associated with their interactions and experiences with products & services offered by an organization in social media, companies have to be always on tow about the thousands of tweets, shares, likes, mentions, customer feedbacks & queries in the multiple social media platforms.
The bigger the business, the more significant the amount of social media data it has to concern itself about, that too on a daily basis. Big is the magic word here that can transform this headache into a data gold mine of sorts from where companies can filter out important and meaningful data that will enable them to garner insights about customer behavior, make amends to pitfalls, and formulate strategies for the future.
The tech guru elaborates below three ways to efficiently use big data and its powers to boost an organization’s social media strategy that will make big data a magic wand of the PR department:
Separate the melody from the noise
With big data, companies can fish out the social media interactions that matter from the thousands of tweets, mentions, and likes that flood their social media handles. Many social media analytics tools can make the job much easier by filtering out the unimportant ones from the ones that matter by implementing algorithms based on keywords, messages, views, and other fields that can be customized according to the need.
Track sudden changes in message volume
Sudden changes in the volume of messages in social media can mean both praise and condemnation, more latter than the former, the prevalent medium being Twitter, where one fulminating tweet against an organization’s product or service gets retweeted a million times, reaching out to twice the number.
A simple big data analytics tool can come to the aid by firing off alerts and generating warning emails whenever keywords like the organization’s name or the name of the product or service in question are mentioned in usually high numbers.
Armed with this, companies and organizations can prevent an already bad situation to being worse; they can put out the wildfire at its less vicious stage.
Track public sentiments, opinions, and their shifts
Sentiments and opinions, like how people feel about a particular service or product offered by any organization, are quite fickle and can shift over time or with any incident. With the help of big data analytics tools, these sentiments can be tracked over time by extensively scanning thousands of public responses like messages, feedback, tweets & likes and then categorizing them by their nature and vibe, like positive, negative, or neutral.
This would enable companies to gauge how consumers, existing and potential alike, feel about their offerings, the competition, or anything pertaining to that. They would also be able to sense a possible paradigm shift in public emotion at its beginning and take corrective measures or adjust current strategies accordingly.
These were some of the basic benefits big data analytics offers companies by helping them retain existing customers and make new ones on the way. More and more companies are finally understanding these benefits. They are integrating big data analytics in their social media strategy, thus making big data a lucrative thing to learn with high future career prospects. According to the tech guru, big data is the future of databases, and it has not only arrived but has settled. As advised by the tech guru, now is the time for getting formally introduced to big data to be on the boat when it leaves for the gold.
