6 reasons data is crucial to your social media strategy

If your brand or company has a social media strategy, are you using and segmenting all of the data you can acquire? Did you know that with the data you can gather intelligence that can strengthen your campaign and help you find areas where you can improve on your strategy? The data that you can gather can be used to help you identify the positive and negative sentiment about your business, discover hidden opportunities, and find valuable information regarding your target audience that you can use to make sure your message reaches them and you can engage with them.

This works exactly the same as any analysis of marketing data. Data stays just data if you aren’t doing anything with it. But, if you use the data you gather from your social media marketing (SMM) campaign to help you improve your strategy and find new opportunities, your data can turn into a gold mine. Here are a couple of tips to help you make sense of the data from your social media campaign.

Social media data insights

1. Customer insight
The insights you get from engaging with people on the social web can give you a deeper understanding of various insights regarding your targeted audience to enhance your position and strengthen your digital presence. The insights gathered about your target audience can also help you establish any areas that needs to be improved to increase your customer service.

2. Increase the effectiveness of your campaign
By analysing the data and insights you gather from your campaign it will give you a clear indication of where to improve it. Your SMM campaign should always be flexible so that you can always only focus on the areas that work and leave everything that doesn’t contribute any value.

3. Protect your digital reputation
By having a monitoring (listening) strategy in place it can greatly help you protect your digital reputation from negative feedback before it snowballs. If you are proactively monitoring what is being talked about online regarding your niche, this data can help you identify any issues in your market before it gets out of hand and turns into a crisis.

4. Responding in real time to customer queries
Any way you look at it, traditional customer service is expensive. Using social media data to identify and be notified of any customer complaints and queries allows you to respond within minutes before the issue becomes a bigger problem. With social media, customer service can be done in real time for a fraction of the cost compared to traditional customer support. This will not only save you money, but time as well.

5. Decrease market research costs
A proper market research program costs quite a lot of money. Using social media insights can decrease these costs and will help you with your recruitment requirements by screening people online. It also decreases the costs related to focus groups and panel studies.

6. Increase sales
Using the insights and data from social media can help you optimize your campaigns and strategies to obtain a greater conversion and sales rates. Social media data and insights can be integrated with many CRM systems to identify customers that are ready to make a purchase.

Rework your sale strategy
People shopping online are becoming more accustomed to reading product reviews before they make the final decision. They are also relying more on peer recommendations within their own network. All this social media data and insight can be used to analyse and increase your sales strategies.

With the analysis of social media data, you might discover valuable answers to questions related to your social media campaign. Don’t wait for your competitors to overtake you on the social web. Use the data you have available and make your strategies work for you.