A Little Insight into our Big Data

Here is a behind the scenes look at a few of our numbers.  It is a massive challenge to capture and organize our data as there are few to no rules saying big data must be static. In fact, it is constantly changing.  Two components which we maintain weekly are the categories or buckets which we use to organize our affinity points and the other is fan engagement.

As of March 25th we tracked 3325 different categories across 10 different social media affinitiy "verticals", containing over 35,000 individual entities.

Social Media Analytics: Market Segmentation in the New World.

Market Segmentation, even to many marketers, is a fuzzy concept that is recognized as difficult and time consuming.  The thought of market segmentation conjuors up thoughts lengthy surveys, followed by an even longer analysis. Coupled with the fear of being late to market, it is little wonder why marketers struggle to properly segment their consumers.  

Another approach businesses try is to compile an analysis of their customer data in their contact database.  In the past, to target a runner with a running-related product, I would advertise  or run a joint campaign with a vertical publication, say, "Runner’s World". Alternatively, I would query my customer database trying to find good targets based on data attributes (geography, industry segment, engagement level, etc).

Presuming, you captured the right details to segment, your customer data records are a good start - for marketing existing products. New products, or those developed to target another market for customers you don’t yet have probably shouldn’t have the same messaging and targeting.

As a result of these challenges and disparate data, businesses may choose to punt and rely on instinct to partition customers or rely on old data or worse, their instinct. In social media, companies can gather more information to customize messages based on the interactions over a long-term engagement. But it is near impossible to scale and personalize marketing based on individual social media engagement. This is where market segmentation based on social media behavior, comes into play.

2013 Social Media Brand Analysis Infographic

With interest intensifying on how to best leverage social media for brands and businesses, we thought it would be clever if we turned our platform back onto the social media networks to see which brands, TV networks, and celebrities the social networks' fans engaged and identified with the most. Since this was new to us we found several unexpected relationships, some of which could present great opportunites for both brands and the networks.

[Update: We are letting you guess the top celebrities for each network to win a free month trial.]

The 2013 Social Media Brand Analysis Infographic is available in both png and pdf (large) formats.