10 Applications of Big Data in Social Media

“The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people.”

- Jon Ronson

 

Social media is a powerful tool that has traversed all kinds of boundaries to connect people and bring them closer to one another. With the foundation of the internet fuelling the engine of social media, netizens have become social butterflies to engage in communication and connection. 

 

Unlike the conventional times when people had to set free their pigeons in order to send messages to their lovers, the contemporary era requires you to send a message that gets delivered in a moment of time. 

 

The unbreakable bonds that form the chain of the internet are so powerful that before anyone wishes to unsend the message that they have just sent, the other person already receives a notification. 

 

Powerful social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter are literally the drivers of the journey that you and I embark upon every day. From watching memes to sharing news, we all use social media and some even benefit from its mere existence. 

 

Today, it is essential to acknowledge the fact that social media has quite well spread like a wildfire that cannot be extinguished easily. From leisure time interests to full-time careers, the masses have extracted many benefits from social media sites that only seem to expand as time goes by. 

 

However, social media is not alone in the journey of technological advancement that happens to have developed so much. The increasing use of artificial intelligence and big data in the social media environment has advanced very well ahead of its expectations and thus, its scope has also widened. 

 

Applications of Big Data in Social Media

 

The use of big data in various fields and industries is a closely debated and observed topic that social media experts are actively engaged in. 

 

With such a wide scope and an expansive area of work, social media can not only use big data to explore the unfound facts and figures but also develop new areas of work in social media analytics and other related tasks. 

 

As the world of social media has developed so much, big data has a major role to play in its development. Given below are the top 10 applications of big data in social media. 

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Applications of Big Data in Social Media

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1. Target Audience

 

As we begin to understand the importance of big data in the realm of social media, it is necessary that we grasp the significance of big data in itself. Big data in its entirety, is a concept that handles huge amounts of data and organizes them to extract insights from it. 

 

These insights can be related to the audience of a certain product, their feedback for the same, or anything else. When it comes to social media, big data is used to extract target audiences and a real-time market segmentation data report in order to help various companies promoting their products on Instagram or Facebook hit the right spot. 

 

This means that big data accumulates information on the audiences and distributes it to influencer accounts. Aiming for the right target in marketing and promotion is all about spreading the right information to the right people. 

 

Thus, big data helps companies and businesses in achieving their target audience and reaching them without any delays.

 

“Like any other business initiatives, social media marketing is aimed at increasing revenue, but it is no use offering meat to a vegan. So knowing your targeted audience means everything.”

- Big Data in Social Media Revenue 

 

2. Predictive Analytics

 

Since big data can also be called the mine of information, data is always present at the disposal of those who want to gain insights from it. The role of big data can also be perceived as that of indicating future outcomes and preparing businesses and companies for the same. 

 

Predictive Analytics forecasts possible outcomes on the basis of the past records of the company’s performance or pertaining to a certain phenomenon. With the help of predictive analytics, social media users can very well gain insights into what can happen in the future and prepare themselves for that. 

 

Using humongous information that big data stores and studies through, social media can be predicted and forecasted. This helps to avoid numerous social media crises. 

 

3. Privacy Concerns

 

The third use of big data in social media is of privacy concerns. Even though big data is the pro and con of privacy concerns in social media, it certainly helps to protect the privacy of millions of users. 

 

On one hand, big data helps data vendors to provide useful information to social media businesses to reach their audiences. 

 

On the other hand, big data solutions help social media platforms to restrict information leakage and install various checkpoints to verify whether the person who is trying to barge into someone’s information is himself or someone else. This can include facial recognition, question-answer keys, or even a passcode. 

 

4. Fake News

 

One of the biggest advantages of big data in social media lies in restricting the spread of fake news. Social media is flooded with fake news that intends to trigger violence and hate speech against one another. 

 

However, the origin of fake news and the dire need for fake news detection also lies among its users. With the help of big data, social media operators can easily identify real news and fake news and pull down the latter to maintain social harmony and peace. 

 

With the help of big data, such platforms can also identify fake social media accounts to declutter the social media space and regulate it for the welfare of all users. 

 

5. Performance Evaluation

 

It is an unsaid fact that social media goes without competition. Almost every social media business is competing with each other in order to reach most users and establish brand loyalty. However, that is not possible for all users. While some flare and maintain their brand reputation, others lag behind wondering what went wrong. 

 

This is where big data can be of big help and help businesses evaluate their presence and performance on social media. By scanning through huge amounts of data, the performance of various social media accounts can be evaluated on a variety of criteria. 

 

These criteria include account engagement (likes, comments, and shares), followers, and other simple yet significant grounds for identifying whether your social media account is going in the right direction or not. 

 

6. Product Demand

 

The sixth application of big data analytics in social media refers to product demand. As netizens surf through social media all day long, they search for various items or products that they might need or desire. 

 

As soon as a user looks for a product or a social media account for the same, big data analytics adds this search to its report of product demand and product development.  

 

This helps businesses to gain insights into what is trending among the audiences and thus, they can better develop their product with the same features. 

 

7. Marketing Strategies

 

As mentioned before, big data is a wealth of information that can provide useful insights to marketing agencies and professionals. A lot of time, marketing stints and strategies fail simply because the audiences do not like them. 

 

This can be solved by digging useful information from big data analytics to evaluate the most popular and effective marketing strategies. Since these strategies play a very significant role in promoting a product or a service, they must be very effective in reaching out to the audiences. 

 

By using big data and its tools, marketing professionals can choose from the most responded to strategies and employ them to generate more sales and popularity of the product. 

 

8. Promotion

 

Related to the use of marketing strategies, the application of big data can also help businesses to deal with the promotion. Social media promotion is a lot different than offline promotion. 

 

With the help of influencer marketing and promotion using sponsor advertisements, social media businesses can easily generate an organic following on their account and simultaneously transform advertising.  

 

While this is not enough to sell their product, they can certainly promote content related to that product. For instance, shopping brands can promote content based on fashion, looks, and accessories related to clothing. 

 

By surveying the data available, businesses can develop promotion ideas and work on them to generate support and sales from the audiences in a short span of time. 

 

9. Mass Communication

 

Moving towards the end, the use of big data in social media is also witnessed in the field of mass communication. Originally a medium of mass communication, social media helps people connect and communicate with each other from one corner of the world to the other. 

 

With the help of big data reports, social media platforms can mass communicate messages and address the users related to some issues. All it needs is to extract their personal details, reach out to them, and contact them for the same purpose. 

 

This is similar to mass emailing or mass messaging which helps social media platforms to propagate or promote a certain type of issue. 

 

10. Data Analysis

 

Last but not the least, big data leads to data analysis that is very helpful for social media. As social media is all about popular trends and content material, data analysis using big data tools aids social media professionals to analyze what is actually being liked. 

 

Other than that, social media accounts can be analyzed on the basis of their activity or liking. With so much data to evaluate and filter, big data tools are the most effective in performing such tasks with minimal errors and maximum efficiency. 

 

“Big data allows marketers to identify social media trends and gain insights, which can be used to make engagement decisions like which users to communicate with, which group of users should receive marketing emails., etc.”

- Identifying Social Media trends using Big Data 

 

Future of Social Media

 

To sum up, social media has paved the way for so many people to become influencers. Apart from being the center of the stage, social media has also brought along a wave of new employment opportunities from graphic designers to brand managers in the digital domain. 

 

The future of social media analytics holds a promising scope as is prevalent in the current scenario. With the increasing activity on social media platforms, people have begun to flood the digital space. Similar to a convergent medium such as the internet, social media has become the temple of advertising, communicating, advocating, and mobilizing issues. 

 

Owing to the significant impact of big data on social media, social media has achieved insights, audience interests, and intelligence that will only benefit these platforms in the long run. 

 

From identifying product demand to promotion strategies, social media holds a bright future where scope and skills are all about big data. Using big data analytics and other AI technologies, social media can escape all obstacles and converge with the metaverse to allow people to socialize with their virtual avatars in a parallel world. 

 

Lastly, the power of social media can be best described by the data of its millions of users which is what big data does the best!