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If you’re looking for a competitive advantage with your social media strategy, one of the easiest things you can do right now to gain an edge on your rivals is embracing data. Put data at the heart of your social media strategy, and you’ll be surprised at just how much more effective it can be. Here are three ways that data can make your overall social media strategy more effective.
1 – Pivot faster when things are not working out as planned
Resilient businesses are built around data, and for one very good reason – with access to a lot of data, they have much greater insight into what’s working, and what’s not. Thus, when things are not going as planned, they have a vast treasure trove of data to build on. Instead of making emotional decisions or succumbing to knee-jerk reactions, they can make rational choices based on data.
The classic example here is a social media advertising campaign. Instead of blindly moving from campaign idea to campaign idea, take a closer look at the ad data that companies like Facebook are able to provide you. You’ll have much greater insight into who’s clicking and why – and that can help you craft the perfect advertising campaign that delivers a high ROI.
2 – Get better insights into your business
You don’t need to have a sophisticated data analysis engine to derive better insights from data. Simply putting together a few social media metrics and tracking them over time can help you become much smarter about how your social media is working at any point in time. Most data today is real-time data, meaning that you don’t have to wait a week, a month or a quarter to find out what’s going on. You literally have real-time results on all the most valuable social media metrics, so why not make use of them?
Often, you’ll be able to discover brand new correlations and relationships that you never knew existed. For example, you might find out that your customers really prefer long, in-depth videos on social media rather than short, entertaining videos. If so, it’s time to cue up the explainer videos and enlist the help of your top experts and gurus in putting together some longer-form videos that get better overall engagement.
3 – Create new types of experiences
Now that artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are becoming more and more prevalent in the business world, it’s time to think about new types of experiences that you can be creating for customers and fans. This is actually simpler than it sounds since many developments in the world of AI – such as natural language processing and facial recognition – are now mainstream.
What this means from a social media perspective is that you should no longer be trapped in the same box, creating the same types of social media experiences that you did even 24 months ago. Think about chatbots that can recognize user queries and respond to customer requests. Or think about AI-powered assistants like Alexa or Siri. Now might be the time to create a social media chatbot to hang out with fans online, or to create a new Alexa Skill for the Amazon Echo. This is cutting-edge stuff, but it’s also very accessible, due to how good data technology has become.
Final thought
For years, we’ve been hearing how “data is the new oil.” Well, that’s true for all companies, not just big Fortune 500 companies or huge industrial giants. No matter the size of your business, you can use data to become smarter, quicker and more resilient when rolling out a new social media strategy. What are you waiting for? The future of data is now, the technology is just that good.
