Social media marketing is one of the preferred ways for companies to promote their brand, and there’s a number of reasons for that:

• Social media outreach is incredible. Having 2.8 billion active users, or 42% of the world’s population, social media platforms present a unique opportunity to reach massive audiences. The number is projected to reach 3.9 billion by 2021:
  
  

  Image source: Statista

•  Social media has a unique potential for audience segmentation. For instance, among all social media users, 90.4% of Millennials, 77.5% of Gen X, and almost 50% of Baby Boomers use social media on a daily basis. This means that any marketing campaign with any target audience personas can be successful.  
• Presence on social media contributes to the positive customer experience, with 71% of social media users supporting this claim.

The average time spent on social media a day is a little more than 2 hours. During this time, social media users share terabytes of social data that marketers can benefit from when launching a marketing campaign.

A Brief Intro to Social Data

Social data is the most valuable asset that your brand can extract from social media.

What does it consist of?

Social data is raw data that unites all the information, shared by and collected from social media users. It includes, but is not limited to:

• Demographics: age, gender, occupation, education, language, location, etc. 
• Biographical data: name, address, date of birth, marital status, etc. 
• Feedback: likes, shares, comments, impressions, mentions, hashtags, etc. 

The goal of social data is to understand human behavior that can guide consumers in making purchase decisions. Thus, it’s invaluable for a successful marketing campaign.

Limitations of Social Data

When you mine and apply social media data to a marketing campaign, you will come across the fact that not all social media users share information in equal portions. This is called limitation of social data – when either demographic, biographic or feedback details aren’t available. 

This shouldn’t stop you from using social data for your future marketing campaign, as its benefits significantly outweigh its drawbacks:

• Social data helps you determine which social platform will be the best fit for your next marketing campaign. 
• You’ll be able to accurately determine which content will perform the best by analyzing your top converting posts. 

How your audience prefers to share information – this may help your marketing campaign go viral.

Food for thought: when analyzing social data, all its components should be taken into consideration integrally. If you only analyze feedback (likes, shares, etc.) what you’ll receive is so-called ‘vanity metrics’. These numbers make your online presence look good while carrying no significant value for your consumers.

Applying Social Data

Social data can be hard to work with, as it constantly gets updated and contains a lot of information (some of which may be irrelevant). 

So, to bring some order to this mess, let’s take a look at how you can apply social data to certain stages of developing a successful marketing campaign.

1.  Analyzing Social Media Platforms

Not all social media platforms are a perfect fit for your next marketing campaign. So to start with, take a look at general social data, how different social platforms work in relation to different audiences. 

Demographic data doesn’t look similar for different social media platforms. Here’s a recent graph by Pew Research that covers the three most popular social platforms:

These results represent the current demographics of the above-mentioned social media platforms in the US. As you can see, different audience categories have different preferences when it comes to using social media platforms. 

You can also take a look at the current demographics of other popular social media platforms. For instance, when it comes to gender distribution:

• Twitter is more popular among men than women, with 69% and 31% of users respectively. 
• On the contrary, women dominate Snapchat, with 61% of women and only 38% of men using this platform. 
• Women also predominantly use Pinterest, with 70% of women and only 7% of men on the platform. 

This regularly updated data can give you a general outlook as to what the current demographics of different social platforms is, which will help you choose the best fit for you.

2. Using Social Data for Better Audience Segmentation

All social media platforms have built-in social data analytics tools. Besides the general analysis of your social media presence, these tools provide you with extensive information on the status of your current social media audience. 

Once you’ve decided which platform will be primary for your marketing campaign, it’s time to dig a little deeper. 

For instance, you decided to use Facebook. Your marketing campaign targets primarily men. You need to do further audience segmentation and decide on age, location, and language according to the status of your current Facebook audience. 

Here’s what you might find in Facebook’s social media report:

Here’s how you can apply this social data:

• The percentage of male and female users is divided by their age. On the graph above, for instance, millennial men are the predominant audience. Thus, you can segment the target audience of your marketing campaign by targeting millennial men, aged 25-34. 
• Next stop is the country. This will not only have a direct impact on your content but on the time you will publish your marketing content. So, if you’re in the U.S., and your target audience is in Poland, you’ll need to adjust the posting time according to Poland’s time zone.

Lastly, language. This will also have an impact on how you will design your content. If your Facebook audience uses English predominantly, segment the target audience of your marketing campaign to English speakers only. However, if there is another language with almost as many followers as the primary one, you might consider doing a bilingual marketing campaign.

By taking a look at this social data, you’ll be able to create a target audience persona for your marketing campaign more accurately.

3. Social Data and Content Analysis

Social media platforms also provide you with social data that gives current insights on the current status of your content. On social media platforms, audience feedback on the content is called impressions. 

These impressions are further divided into subcategories. Here’s how it looks on Facebook. 

A general overview of post types:

The analysis of reach and engagement for every post on your Facebook page:

In terms of content analysis, these insights are very valuable. They provide you with the necessary information to:

• Create engaging posts. You can tailor your content strategy according to what your audience likes the most. By looking at post reach and engagement, you can single out types of posts that your audience is the most responsive to. 
• Decide which content will work the best for organic reach. Facebook divides all traffic into organic and paid. If you want your marketing campaign to be successful, you’ll need to go with organic reach. Content insights above will help you decide which posts will work the best. 
• Determine post types that will definitely reach your audience. In the top right corner, you can select different methods of how Facebook delivers content analysis. If you choose “Post Hides/Hides of all Posts…”, you’ll be able to see which content your audience ignores. You can then choose to exclude it from your marketing campaign. 

On Twitter, you can also check out your audience’s interests. You can find this data and more on your Audience Insights dashboard on the platform.

Here’s how this data looks on Twitter:

These insights can help you decide on the main topic that your content will cover. However, you can also integrate other interests of your audience for better engagement rates and general outreach.

Speeding Up Social Data Analysis

Despite every social media platform having its own tool for social data analysis, they don’t provide an all-in-one data dashboard that has all the numbers together. This makes it hard to track social data received over time, which, however, is necessary for the success of a marketing campaign.

To receive the comprehensive analysis of social data that comes from different social platforms, you can use Sotrender’s Analytics tool:

This tool offers the following features:

•         content analysis
•         audience engagement rates
•         transparent reporting
•         benchmarking
•         optimization

The users of this tool also receive personalized tips on how to improve audience engagement and overall social media presence, based on data-driven indexes.

Wrapping Up

Social media platforms provide you with terabytes of social data that you can put to use to make your marketing campaign successful. There are different social data analysis options as well: you can either keep up with the current data or take a look at general social data overview report that social media platforms generate automatically every month. 

Either way, social data that you can mine from social media, contains a lot of details that can help you choose the best platform, segment your target audience, and create content that will help your marketing campaign become successful.