One of the beautiful things about digital marketing is the sheer simplicity of collecting and analyzing data. Analytics are readily available in an atmosphere dominated by big data, with social media sites driving huge amounts of information to companies eagerly seeking a way to gain a competitive advantage. With the right data, there’s an amazing amount of leverage at your fingertips, giving you the potential for a leg up over your biggest competitors. In our last post we shared Social Media Metrics and KPIs Every Social Marketer Needs to Measure. In this post we will be covering some of the ways you can leverage your social data for success.

Building Relationships & Trust

A big advantage of social media is the ability to build relationships with your biggest supporters. With social media providing the opportunity to read comments, track traffic, and respond directly to inquiries and comments, companies have found themselves even more in the driver’s seat than ever before, learning from customers and making changes appropriately.

The ability to understand what a consumer is looking for gives a new and unique insight into elements that can build trust between customers and companies. By following through on social media claims and implementing customer suggestions and ideas, you can build trust among your followers, cultivating a loyal fan base that will stand behind you.

Gauge Interest and Demand

Want to know whether your customers are interested in a new product or service? Take it to social media. By tracking what people are talking about, what images and posts users are sharing, and what posts of yours are most frequently liked, you can get a good idea of what your followers are looking for. This ability to predict trends before they become mainstream has proved invaluable for businesses, especially for those whose products and services depend largely on popular culture.

Before launching a new product or bringing a new idea to market, take a look at what your social media analytics are telling you. With the right tracking, it’s possible to know whether your launch will succeed or fail before it even happens.

Predict Future Behavior

If there’s one power most companies would love to have, it’s the ability to predict the future. Luckily, with social media, now you can. Instead of basing decisions on past occurrences, like downloads and web traffic, businesses can analyze their social data to look for clues and indicators related to upcoming trends in real time.

Social data has the ability to provide valuable insights into customer behavior, allowing you to know what your customers are looking for before they make themselves heard. With the right approach to analysis, you can interpret what your customers need, and develop products and services in direct response.

Drive traffic

When companies launch new products and services, their greatest fear is that no one will notice. With social media, this kind of problem is a lot less frequent, but many businesses are still ignoring the the valuable social data tools that can keep customers coming back.

Take, for example, social contests coordinated using Strutta that are designed to attract followers and generate interest for a new idea. By driving traffic to your page, you can analyze how users are interacting with your promotional material in order to enhance your methodology and fine tune your marketing practices. If your sweepstakes didn’t generate enough sales, social data may be able to tell you why, opening the door for a revised strategy.

There’s a lot to learn from social data, ranging from the demographics most interested in your posts to what kinds of contests and promotions are more likely to draw in new users. By leveraging what social data has to tell you, your company has the ability to create a competitive advantage and develop a marketing method that can bring you one step closer to success.

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