4 Ways To Leverage The Power Of Social Media With Data

Social media platforms are arguably the most used parts of the internet today. Now if you are like me, all you probably do on social media is keep up with friends, post a few pictures and maybe read the news. Social media is where you relax and check what is going on in the world when you are done with work (alongside Netflix, of course). But you could do a lot more with social media. You can grow your business exponentially by simply engaging with your customers and audience on social media platforms alone.

Plus, many people are now turning to social media to answer their questions and collect opinions on their life choices. This makes it quite crucial for you as a business owner to learn how to manage and use social media for your business and learn how to collect and manipulate social media data to leverage the power of social media.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the role of social media in modern business practices, the best way to collect data from social media, and how to use data to leverage social media power for your business interests. Feel free to use the table of contents to skip to the part that most interests you.

Table of Contents

The Role of Social Media in Business

For the millions of people who use social media every day, social media serves many purposes. It’s a break from the usual monotony of their lives, a balm to soothe wounds, a way to see the world without leaving our homes, and so much more. However, for the opportunistic minority who are constantly looking for any edge they can find to get ahead in life, social media is a tool—an advantage they can leverage to achieve their personal and professional goals. Here are some of the opportunities afforded to businesses by social media:

Advertising

One of the most apparent opportunities offered by social media to businesses and business owners is advertising. Like I said earlier, social media platforms are the biggest marketplaces in the world. Millions of people, old and young, male and female, white and black, use social media daily. This means that no matter who your audience is composed of, there is a high probability that you will find them on social media.

This has revolutionized the world of advertising and made it easy for businesses to grow larger audiences composed of people from all around the world. More than that, it allows you to communicate in real-time with this audience, learn their needs, and tailor your marketing process to fit these needs. In order words, it makes it easy to give people what they want. 

Real-time monitoring of trends

Another significant role social media is playing in business is enabling businesses to monitor trends. It has always been the curse of owning a business that, despite your best efforts, there remains an informational divide between you and your customers. Previously, events and trends might go on for weeks, even months before the traditional media gets a hold of it and publishes the information for the general public. However, with the advent of social media and the “almighty” hashtag, you can keep up with events and trends as they are happening and react to them as necessary. Even better, you can use these trending events to promote your business and products (responsibly, of course).

Data analytics

Last but not least, social media offers businesses the opportunity to monitor and collect data on people’s opinions on just about any subject in the world, including your competitors. People are constantly putting out personal experiences, thoughts, anecdotes, and beliefs on every single topic available. Social media is the go-to for many people when they wish to express themselves. All this has lead to a wealth of data being generated daily across social media platforms. And this data is available for your use if you know how to get it. Not only that, you can use this data to leverage the power of social media platforms and give your business an edge over competitors.

How to Collect and Use Data to Leverage the Power of Social Media

Before we go into how you can use social media data to reach your business goals, let’s talk about collecting social media data. Or, more precisely, let’s talk about web scraping. While you can easily view, read, monitor, and interact with most of the data generated on social media, collecting the data in large volumes is another story. You can’t just click a button to download, say, all the tweets under a particular hashtag. In short, you need a specialized data collection method to gather social media data in large volumes. Web scraping is this method. 

Web scraping uses bots to crawl through the source code of a given website page and extract data according to some set parameters. Using technologies like APIs and rotating proxies, web scraping makes it exponentially easier to collect data online, monitor trends, and curate opinions. Web scraping bots extract the data from the target URL and present it to you in an easy-to-read format.

With web scraping, you can download at the click of a button. However, when scraping social media platforms, you should take care to avoid privacy violations by only scraping publicly available data.

How to use social data for your business

There are so many ways by which you could use data to leverage the power of social media and achieve your business goals. Here are a few: 

1. Identify the best platform to promote your business: While most people use more than one social media platform, the platforms themselves are designed for different categories of people. Scraping data on the kind of content being put out on various platforms can help determine where the content you want to put out would be best received.
2. Optimize your content strategy: As we mentioned above, scraping social media platforms can help you determine where your content would be best received. Even better, it can help you choose the type of content that will be best received on a particular platform. By analyzing the types of content that get the most reactions, comments, and so on, you can easily determine the type of content you need to create to get the reactions you want.
3. Market research: One of the first places people express their opinion on a particular product or business is social media. By scraping social media data alone, you can perform thorough market research, determine what people want, why, when, and where they want it. You can also collect data on what your competitors are doing and how their customers respond to them on social media. This way, you can identify which customers are not satisfied and how you can take advantage of the discord. 
4. Monitor and enhance brand image: By entering a few keywords describing your business in your web scraping tool, you can quickly obtain data on what people are saying about your business on social media. If your scraping service uses an API, you can get this data in real-time. By monitoring what people are saying about your business on social media, you can easily highlight the good comments, build on it, and perform quick damage control when bad comments break out. 

The Power of Social Media for Small Business

While every business nowadays needs to maintain a good image on social media, big and established companies have a sort of buffer that reduces the return on investment of a social media campaign and, at the same time, reduces their vulnerability. This is not so for smaller businesses. Maintaining a solid social media management strategy has an almost infinite ROI for small businesses, majorly because it gives them a chance to challenge the established companies. It costs way less to run an online ad campaign as opposed to traditional advertising. This makes it possible for small businesses with low advertising budgets to stand a chance.

So, if you are running a small business, developing a solid plan for social media is one of the easiest ways to boost your business presence. An excellent way to use the power of social media to boost your online presence is by using influencers. Social media influencers are thought leaders, celebrities, and generally, people who have many followers and whose opinions carry weight on social media. A whole branch of online marketing has sprung up based on using these influencers to promote businesses. By leveraging the power of social media influencers, you can promote your business to a broader audience, gain more audience members, and improve your business’s recognizability. 

Using Scraping Robot To Facilitate the Role of Social Media in Your Business

Suppose you are looking for a web scraping service to help you obtain the data you need to develop an efficient social media strategy and leverage the power of social media. In that case, Scraping Robot is what you need.

When you sign up for any of our scraping modules, you get 5,000 free scrapes to scrape any website of your choice. If you choose to continue after using your free scrapes, every subsequent scrape costs only $0.0018.

All our web scraping modules use APIs to enable you to automate your web scraping process and collect data in real-time. We also make use of multiple proxies, allowing you to send an unlimited number of scraping requests simultaneously.

Conclusion

Nowadays, every business and business owner needs to learn how to leverage social media tools and platforms to promote their business and achieve their business goals. At Scraping Robot, we help you harness the power of social media by making it easy for you to collect the data you need, when you need it, at the most affordable prices.

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Saheed Opeyemi