The Future of Social Media Data and Marketing

Here’s an interesting tidbit regarding social media, big data, and marketing: the projection for 2018 was that brands would be spending 20 percent of their marketing budgets on social media. Has that prediction held out? The fact is it hasn’t. The 2018 CMO survey indicates that brands are dedicating nearly 14 percent of their marketing budgets to social media. That’s an impressive figure compared to 2017 ” it’s about 4 percentage points higher ” but it’s a far cry from 20 percent.

Although the brands in the survey have not ramped up their social media marketing spend as much as expected, they have grown more confident with mining their own data. In the next two years, 70 percent of brands will increase their usage of online customer data, compared with an increase of 62.7 percent during the past two years. Conversely, about 2 percent of brands will decrease their use of third-party data over the next two years.

That could be result of an increasing confidence in marketing analytics. In 2017, 72 percent of marketing departments were investing in analytics, and they expected the amount of money they’re spending on analytics to see a 229 percent increase by 2020.

This expected increase in analytics spend is commensurate with how much data social media users are steadily creating through their interactions with brands and each other. The ongoing trend of using mobile devices, social media platforms, and online shopping is producing lots of data every day, says Ontrack author Michael Nuncic, to the extent that the amount of data in the datasphere will increase to about 163 zettabytes in 2025, an increase of over 1000 percent from 2016.

Will the future of social media marketing and big data see an increase in privacy concerns? Firms don’t seem to think so. Only 10 percent are worried about how their company uses consumer data, even though GDPR places strict regulations on data usage.

Firms are concentrated on mining social media data and analyzing it for insights, and the top activity for brands on social media is cultivating brand awareness, as well as brand building. The next most popular activity is acquiring new customers. As predictive analytics gets more advanced, expect firms to move more towards acquiring new customers through advanced methods.

Hootsuite points out that, in the future, advanced social media marketing methods will involve the following:

• An emphasis on product: Because more people are starting to research products on social platforms, successful brands will provide in-depth product information and will find ways to encourage consumer participation in reviewing and talking about products.
• An emphasis on visual and voice: By 2020, 50 percent of searches will be either visual or vocal; successful brands will provide plenty of visual content, and they’ll craft product descriptions and other marketing copy to reflect how people talk.
• An emphasis on messaging apps and chatbots: By 2020, 80 percent of smartphone owners will use a messaging app; successful brands will dominate at selling directly to consumers through chatbots on messaging apps.
• An emphasis on video: Social media users are consuming a ton of video, and Hootsuite anticipates video saturation by 2020 due to the fact that 46 percent of brands are implementing a video marketing strategy; video will need to stand out by being entertaining, unique, and full of value to the consumer and their community.
• An emphasis on AR and VR: By 2020, the virtual and augmented reality market will be worth an estimated $150 billion; successful brands will find ways to use AR and VR to appeal to a Generation Z audience that loves novelty, and marketers will increasingly use VR to do research.

Virtual shopping, in which participants help figure out which visual factors affect purchases the most, will be one method marketers use to collect proprietary data. Another method involves using descriptive analytics to determine the efficacy of Facebook ads versus boosted posts, and using predictive analytics to determine which factors will positively influence audience reception of a prospective campaign.

For brands that want to rule the social media marketing space ” which is important given how much time target audiences spend on social networks ” it’s going to be all about effective proprietary data strategy.

Why proprietary data? Because anyone can access third-party data for a small fee. Proprietary data is the data that will matter, because it’s exclusive data a brand mines based on an underlying strategy, as well as a target audience that can have a lot of demographic differences beyond age group, occupation, gender, and income. 

Advanced predictive analytics will play a big role, meaning the brands willing to shell out the most bucks for high-end SaaS or proprietary solutions will stand the best chance of capturing the social media market.