People share everything on social media.
They post about normal things like high school graduations, church confirmations, family reunions, but they also post about things that might be better left unsaid. They make public their agitated opinions about the latest political events. They tell stories about their frustrations with teachers who work with their children. They share stories of them drinking alcoholic beverages of all kinds at all times of the day. They even tell the whole world, both friends and friends of friends, about the poor choices that their teenagers make, as well as the infidelities of their spouses.
In fact, if you could package up all of the things that people put on social media and soft through it in an organized fashion you could use it to anticiapte how some of these prolific posters might react in certain situations. You might be able to guess what kind of music they listen to, what kind of schools they want to send their children to, what kind of politicians that they would support.
And if an individual user might be able to predict their friends’ behavior based on stories about drunken falls of gold carts and tales of poorly prepared preschool teachers, imagine what a specifically designed social media data analysis software platform could do.
We, of course, know what it can do. Empowered by social media data analysis, marketing companies can help their clients provide targeted advertising products that will be of the most interest. With the implementation of name matching software, entity extraction tools, and identity resolution software, in fact, today’s social media data analysis platform can provide extremely efficient use of digital data budgets of any size.
Consider these statistics about the impact that social media is having on digital marketing techniques:
- 1.97 billion people worldwide use Facebook monthly, producing an enormous amount of data every second.
- 319 million people worldwide use Twitter monthly.
- Text mining involves a four step process: Information retrieval, natural language processing, information extraction, and data mining.
- 2.67 billion social media users worldwide is the estimate for the year 2018. This would be an increase from the 2.34 billion in 2016.
- $3 billion is the current value of the text analytic market, and it is forecasted to reach almost $6 billion by the year 2020.
- Although it may seem that everything we do in the digital world is being watched, The International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that less than 1% of data is ever even analyzed. Text mining is the platform that many in the digital analysis market think can bridge the gap and capitalize on the missing 99%.
