Social Media and Big Data

Today we are surfing on the internet, visiting different websites, posting, liking and commenting on events and images of our friend. This is leaving a digital footprint, which is converted into a stored data, that is very precious for companies that seek to understand and target even better their customers.

Social Media and Big Data

On average, a user has five social media accounts and spends approximately one hour on social media. Shockingly, a vast majority of Americans get their news from Facebook only.

Everyday social media websites are abuzz with communication around the brand. Facebook witnesses millions of likes, posting and people’s reaction to different news and photos. All this creates data in petabytes (1 petabyte = 1000,000 gigabytes). But unlike other data, social websites create unstructured and uncharacterized data. If you want to get a glimpse of how confusing it can be, go through a Twitter feed of any popular brand, and also to its Facebook page among other social profiles (variety in big data) should you wish to be more confused, and then try to make sense of this all from a marketing point of view.

All this stands as a testimony of the fact that social media is a big contributor to the tremendous amount of data produced i.e. Big Data.

Big Data helps in digital marketing by

1. Telling who your customers are

2. How your customers feel

3. What they want

4. Their source of information about your brand

5. How do they arrive at the buying decision

Chinese Social Credit System – A New Dystopia for Big Data

In some religions, there are two angels, one which keeps an account of your good deeds and the other about your bad ones. But in today’s world, it is going to be algorithms. Regardless of what one believes, we are heading to a world where our deeds will be recorded in the near future. The Chinese government has rolled out a social credit system which is going to be compulsory by 2020.

It has allowed its internet giants, like Alibaba and Tencent only to run and bring this utopia to the realm of existence. Right now they are making the beta version of this system.

Whenever you post something on RenRen or Weibo (which are equivalent to Facebook and micro blogging site Twitter), you will create a data which is going to affect your score. If you post a photo with a person with bad credit score then this is going to negatively affect your credit score. To process all this information, a large amount of data is going to be needed to process. This is going to be provided by Big Data from social media as more and more people are shifting their lives on it.

Big data is going to be a big profitable business that can no longer be ignored. It will not be wrong to think that the more you learn about your customers the better you will be able to target them with your social media campaigns, and seeing the gigantic size of data produced by various social channels, it becomes imperative that you make use of big data in your social media marketing campaigns. By giving you a far deeper understanding of your customers and their relationship with your brand, big data will help you fine tune your social media messages, and choose the right social media platform to disseminate information.