How Social Media Data is Fast Becoming Business Intelligence Data

The information you post on social media may be playing a bigger role in business strategy than you think. Companies in a post-COVID world of remote work can organize data from the social channels that their consumers use for new insights into lead generation, customer engagement, brand awareness, and much more. But building organic reach on social media remains a mystery to many.

Companies doing any level of online business must understand how to build a community and achieve organic reach using data obtained by analyzing social media data. More than 3.5 billion people actively use social media worldwide already, a number that is likely to only rise as businesses continue to grow their online presence. To that end, it’s worth taking a quick dive into how social media data is fast becoming invaluable business intelligence data. 

CRM data can personalize the customer experience

There’s something undeniably thrilling about the impact you can make with a personalized social media presence on your client relationships. Social media data can present new and exciting ways for businesses to cater to their customers. That’s because social media isn’t simply an outlet for your business’s digital advertising: it’s also a powerful platform that you can use to optimize your client relationships. 

Some businesses likely understand that data from social media must, at the very least, be kept organized and all in one place. But when it comes to social media marketing, most businesses tend to overlook the potential of customer relationship management (CRM). An effective social media strategy that collects social media data as business intelligence needs a CRM to learn more about customers, gain access to their real-time activities, and ultimately personalize the entire customer journey. 

You can enhance your personalization efforts even further by using a CRM to trigger personalized ads via social, media. These ads are great opportunities to use social media data in your CRM to show ads that increase repurchases and remind customers about the products they love the most. Automate your highly customized ads to encourage more customers to purchase from you and continue to use data in your CRM to fine-tune your depth of personalization. You can then segment the data you collect based on customer demographics to more efficiently break down which prospects. 

You’ll want to keep your current clients abreast of your latest efforts to increase repurchases and regularly let them know that you value their purchases. Project management and client collaboration software that allows you to invite customers or clients to communicate from a centralized location is an ideal solution to meet these needs. This is especially true for tools that come with essential features such as automated storage of project updates to the cloud and a web-based centralized space for file storage. With client collaboration software as your CRM, you no longer need to worry about digging through email chains or old repositories for a single attachment or data point that’s relevant to your social media data strategy.

Non-marketing business opportunities become easier to identify

Identifying new business opportunities comes down to analyzing your current audience; this is especially true when you’re analyzing your audience via social media data. Business executives now have the chance to heavily rely on social media to spot attractive business opportunities, including those outsides of marketing, by analyzing large sets of data with specialized analytics tools. 

Accurate user data is necessary for any website operation. If you don’t know what your users are up to, you’ll be hard-pressed to figure out what they need from you as a provider of services or products. Powerful data analytics tools are, luckily, readily available to businesses that want to leverage social media data as business intelligence data to keep users returning to your website time and again.

But how do you know which analytics tool to choose? After all, the sheer mass of all of the data you have access to can be rather confusing. In short: the best analytics tool to parse customer data and identify business opportunities is one that combines qualitative and quantitative metrics. 

A tool such as this lets users glean lots of general information about user interactions with their site as well as examine qualitative data that shows how individual users interact with features on your site. For full-fledged outreach campaigns that make social data analysis inextricable from their success, tools that let you combine data from multiple sources into intuitive dashboards and reports can make it easier to learn about audience behavior and website performance to spot key non-marketing business opportunities.

Customer reactions provide good feedback

By now you’ve hopefully settled on a reliable process of storing disparate pieces of social media data and analyzing them with a web analytics tool that suits your needs. It’s time to make your process more iterative by implementing a way to analyze customer reactions as feedback to improve your marketing via social media. 

Every customer reaction is a data point you can use to further make your website a more intuitive or user-friendly place for your visitors, and analyzing each customer reaction is critical for running a business online today. This holds true even for customers who aren’t ready to make a purchase just yet. 

As your online business starts tailoring its marketing and outreach efforts based on social media data you’ve analyzed, you’ll need to be actively and readily collecting and reviewing any feedback you get. 

Use this information as business intelligence to streamline your process of data analysis and subsequent tweaks you make to your marketing strategy. Tools like omnichannel support solutions can help bring insights on customer reactions to the fore and keep you updated on how happy customers are key phrases they use or actual survey feedback they provide.

This will allow you to come up with new ideas or services that people might like, and immediate feedback can help you identify any serious bugs or issues with your website as visitors interact with it that you need to take care of to prevent drops in your organic web traffic.

Social media data is fast becoming business intelligence data for businesses who know where (and how) to look. Companies that already use a CRM as part of their marketing efforts have a headstart in terms of aggregating useful data to analyze. If you’re not using a CRM to collate your social media data, there’s no sense in waiting any longer to get one.

Summary

The proper analytics tools to make sense of the information housed in a CRM is the next must-have asset that businesses need to obtain if they want to transform social media data into actionable intelligence. A good analytics tool that can combine qualitative and quantitative data regarding customer data points such as their reactions on social media is absolutely vital to a long-term and insightful social media data analysis campaign. 

With these tools on hand, businesses can confidently iterate on their process of social media data analysis to reach more customers in the future. Remember that in this day and age, no marketing strategy worth its salt can ever stagnate. Continue to rely on customer feedback and holistic insights from your analysis to properly use social media data as business intelligence.

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About the author:

Nahla Davies is a software developer and tech writer. Before devoting her work full time to technical writing, she managed—among other intriguing things—to serve as a lead programmer at an Inc. 5,000 experiential branding organization whose clients include Samsung, Time Warner, Netflix, and Sony.