Big Data’s Push in the Social Media World
From posts to tweets to updates to photos to videos and every social stop in between, social media sites push a ton of data every millisecond of the day.
Luckily, big data is helping the social networking world direct all that data to the appropriate places.
With socially savvy data in mind, here are just a few ways big data has a positive impact on social media:
Optimized Social Experience
Social media is all about making connections and networking with a massive audience.
In fact, social media users depend on social sites like Facebook and Twitter to connect with friends and family as well as find interests similar to their own. Where big data comes into play is by taking the structured and unstructured data from millions of users and turning it into useful information.
Without the data analyzing that big data provides, social media users wouldn’t receive relatable friend recommendations, advertisements, and other forms of engagement through the web.
Thanks to big data, social media is a much more targeted and personal experience.
Social Marketing
Marketing and social media go hand-in-hand and more businesses than ever before are relying on social campaigning to find new customers and keep current customers loyal.
Big data is helping businesses streamline the social marketing process by helping predict future behaviors based on data sets as well as using those data sets to better target audiences.
When big data helps businesses optimize their marketing and campaigning practices, it makes the social experience much more enjoyable for all parties involved.
From archiving and understanding customer feedback to correlating social information with product purchase rates, when businesses stay focused on the big data bottom line, it increases campaign effectiveness and makes the social media world better.
Building a Social Database
Just because social media’s main purpose is socializing doesn’t mean users don’t put a ton of hard work into building their social profiles. Whether it’s an individual user or a business, big data allows social profiles to grow exponentially.
Vast amounts of data don’t mean much if that data isn’t streamlined and accessible.
Big data helps in that aspect too by archiving every post, tweet, picture, video, and comment for later use. In other words, big data not only stores all the data from sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, it makes that data accessible and usable in any number of situations.
Examples of Social Data in Action
Social sites are already putting big data to work to make the world of social networking a better place.
For instance, Facebook is collecting data based on users’ “likes” to more accurately predict what people care about. In addition, LinkedIn is using its data to build a talent graph that will help users on the site make better professional connections.
That’s not all because Pinterest is also taking advantage of big data by collecting data on users’ pinboards and using that information to create optimized fashion trends on the site.
And, Twitter is collecting and processing its millions of daily tweets and all the data that goes along with them to create real-time glimpses into the news stories most Twitter users follow and trust.
From social marketing to the optimized social experience, it’s plain to see that big data’s push into the world of social media is a push in the right direction.
Photo credit: Forbes.com
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