It’s not groundbreaking to say social media should be an essential part of your digital marketing strategy: it gives you a platform for sharing your brand story, news, and care-abouts; offers access to a diverse and scalable audience; and lets you expand your network and build a loyal community. 

Still, many marketing leaders don’t take social media seriously enough. They don’t realize that its value extends far beyond likes, views, shares, clicks, or even sales. Today, according to a recent article in The Drum, social media’s value is unparalleled as an “insights engine that instructs you on what audiences like, dislike, and are willing to buy.” 

However, according to the Sprout Social 2023 State of Social Media Report, 70% say that social data and insights are underutilized. If you fall into that category, here are four ways to use social media data and insights for competitive advantage: 

-       Social Media as an ‘Insights Engine’

Estimates show that more than 4.8 billion social media users worldwide exist today. From content sharing and follower engagement to complex advertising campaigns, there are many ways businesses can utilize social media to tap into this massive audience of potential customers. 

Each social profile is a personal reflection of the user, often with many self-reported preferences. Social media platforms provide extensive demographic, psychographic, and firmographic data about potential customers. This offers valuable audience insights to understand engagement patterns and identify critical demographics, behaviors, preferences, and sentiments. You can uncover powerful data for your business through ongoing listening and by doing the data mining work to understand who social users are and what they want– whether they are existing customers/connections or potential leads. 

-       Inform Decisions Beyond Marketing 

The value of social media data isn’t limited to marketing. The most recent Sprout Social Index reports that 76% of marketers consider social media indispensable for all departments. The article notes, “One of the biggest social media myths is that social data is only relevant to social or marketing. On the contrary, social media data has the power to inform every area and team of your organization and improve your entire business, from product to customer support to PR.” 

Businesses can use social media data to identify gaps in product offerings or services, better understand pain points and create marketing materials that address them, hear customer concerns, workshop customer support solutions, perform competitive analyses, enhance the customer experience, and more. 

-       Social Insights to Fuel Customer Acquisition

Bringing it back to marketing, social data can grant you access to the right audience of potential customers, allowing you to fuel more intelligent and targeted customer acquisition campaigns. It can provide new insights into diverse cohorts of customers and potential customers you may not have previously considered. By analyzing social media data, businesses can refine their targeting criteria and deliver more personalized content to prospects. Contact our team for assistance with targeting and reaching social audiences that align with your ideal customer profile.

-       Enhanced Data Matching to Elevate Audience Targeting 

As the overlap between personal and professional is increasing, B2B advertising needs to be able to connect with prospects at work and home with both personal and professional contact information. At OMI, we do this using business and personal contact data such as physical addresses, email addresses, device IDs, social URLs, and more for omni-channel campaigns, including direct mail, display advertising, email marketing, and social media. 

Recently, insights from social media fueled our B2B2C data matching strategy when working with a leading global e-commerce platform provider. For the social portion of the campaign, our match rate was 70% to LinkedIn and 42% to Meta, which is well above industry standards. To match the data, OMI uploaded the custom audience data we built for the provider to both social platforms. This enabled high-impact, omni-channel media activation at scale and gave us incredibly valuable insights into a greater number of prospects – including the ability to understand them better based on their social URLs and to reach them on the channels they use the most.

How well are you leveraging social data? Contact our team to level up your strategies and improve your targeting, media activation, and customer acquisition initiatives.