Social media has shown a revolutionary way for all-size brands to promote their products and services. During pandemics, when the world was locked, but all people at home were online, the brands leveraged digital marketing for brand promotion. The trend is still going on because of the number of social media users (4.59 billion globally), which is around 57% of the world population (8 billion).  

Worldwide social media ad spending is $230 billion; by 2026, it will be $357.92 billion. Now, what do you think how companies are considering it? It is obvious it shows a progressive graph, but most of the big brands are using social media data as business intelligence data. Still, are you figuring out how fast social media data is becoming business intelligence data? Then this article will help you to have an ultimate revelation.  

Let’s start understanding with some basic information.  

What Is the Importance of Social Media Data in Business?

Almost all companies are focusing on their social media strategy due to the considerable shift in purchasing trends. Nearly 92% of global companies use social media analytics to understand consumer behavior and preferences. Analytics helps in data collection from a variety of social channels and to analyze to have a desired outcome via social media marketing.  

It makes social media data more crucial in the current scenario where most users get influenced by channels like Instagram and TikTok. Do not forget Facebook still has more potential than others.  

Analytics is also helping brands to measure the performance of their sales campaigns via social media channels. The marketers working for the brands are retrieving data from search queries, contact forms, and comments and analyzing it to derive meaningful insights. Here business tools such as Power BI, Tableau, and Zoho Analytics are some of the legendary tools, and do you know what they have in common? That is analyzing data and producing worthy insights for business intelligence.  

Social media data in business help for: 

• Enhancing customer onboarding with a brand 
• Improving customer retention 
• Improve branding 
• Reduced promotion cost and more.  

It makes social media a potential medium for growth.   

How Is Social Media Data Collected?

Data-driven analytics platforms are working as the main source to collect the data via like sharing, comments, and actions on social media posts. Other sources of collections are web browsing history, Google Analytics, and engagement with ads.  

If we go deeper, the collected data is categorized into the following which are: 

• Behavioral social media data that comes from transactions, usage and attention heatmaps.   
• Social media engagement data combines web and app interactions, social platform engagement, customer services data, and ad engagement.  
• Personal social media data include names, contact numbers, DOB, and others.  
• Attitudinal data comes from the emotions and preferences expressed by social media users. 
• Social media preference data is derived from the user’s interest, such as political, community, religious, and food preferences, movies & shows, and more.    

So, it is how social media data is collected and categorized for use. But the game does not end here. The next step is to use social media data for business intelligence. It can be said that social media, including other data collection sources, lays a foundation for business intelligence.    

Let’s go deeper into this.  

What is Social Media Business Intelligence?

You can ask this question also as – What is social business intelligence? By not stretching it more, it is a process of creating reports and dashboards via collecting or extracting the data from diverse social media channels.  

 Social business intelligence provides deep insights into marketing performance and helps businesses to make data-driven decisions. The manual process of Social BI is complex and requires expertise in computing, modeling, Data handling, and more.  

 The easiest method is using tools like Power BI. It is a Microsoft-powered business intelligence platform that helps create deeper but simpler insights. For the same, you can get help from any reputed Power BI Development Company.  

How Social Media Data is Used For Business Intelligence?

If data is gold, then social media is a mine where you can dig data as much as you can. You will be surprised to know that social media users generate billions of data in a day, such as.  

Snaps shared in a minute – 2.43 million, pieces of content shared on Facebook in a minute- 1.7 million, Swipes on Tinder- 1.1 million, Tumblr posts in a minute- 79,740 posts.  

It is clearly understood that data is food for applying business intelligence, and from the above stats, it has been proved that social media channels are an unlimited source of data collection. So, here are some points you need to read relevant to how social media is used for business intelligence.  

• Less Data Storage Dependency 

Storage is always a big limitation while handling large data, but not with social media. It offers valuable insights without dependency on storage. It also reduces the data storage cost. Social Media reduces the complexity of database management as data remains structured throughout the way.  

• Competitive Insights 

Business Intelligence works to provide insights so that decisions can be made accordingly. Due to the evolution, social media also provides competitive insights to improve business practices, which is why social media data strongly resembles business intelligence data.  

• Understanding Customer Behavior 

Business intelligence works especially in identifying and understanding customer behavior, so social media is. Using social media, you can closely study customers’ habits, demographics, purchasing patterns, interaction behavior, and more.  

• Pattern Analysis 

Business intelligence is the best for pattern recognition, data visualization, and analysis. You will be surprised to know that social media analytics also has this capability, making it a close relative of business intelligence. You can structure the data coming from the specified KPIs.  

• Content Analytics 

Social media provides easy options for analyzing content marketing efforts. It gives a clear view of how your post and content are performing. It will help you know what you can do to improve your content marketing efforts.  

• Sales Funnel Evaluation 

The Social BI allows you to identify the channels deriving the best results. You can have all data at your fingertips, from engagement clicks to conversions. It helps in understanding the channel’s contribution.  

The Final Thoughts

Out of the total business legends, 85% considered social media data the best business intelligence source. It was revealed in a report by Sprout Social and Harris Poll. That report also claims that 95% of businesses rely on social media data to identify business opportunities. One of the best revelations in the report is that 78% of customers prefer purchasing after having a seamless social media experience with a brand. All these indicate in one direction that social media data is fast becoming