How to Use Social Data to Launch a Successful Marketing Campaign

Are you planning to take more advantage of social media this year?

Amazing, because, at this point, it has already become a necessity – brands are planning to invest almost 50 billion dollars just in social ads this year, and this number will reach 56 billion in 2022:

Social network advertising spending in the United States from 2016 to 2022 (in billions of U.S. dollars)

Credit: Statista

With such growing competition, you need to pay very close attention to what’s currently trending on social media and what your audience expects from you.

Luckily, you won’t have to go places to find this information. It’s all in one place, and it’s called social data.

If you’re wondering, what it is, social data is all the information internet users provide online (mostly through social media). This data often includes demographic and biographic details, as well as any other feedback, such as comments and likes.

Today, we are going to take a look at how you can take advantage of all this information as we discuss 3 tips on how to use social data to launch a successful marketing campaign.

1. Get More Data on Your Target Audience

As we already mentioned a bit earlier, social data can provide you with information on your audience’s demographics.

It’s important to note here that we’re talking about the audience you have on your social media accounts. But, even if your campaign won’t focus solely on social media, you can still find this data relevant because your social media audience might be among those your campaign will target.

So, where can you find the social data that provides insights into the demographics of your followers?

Choose the social platform that will be involved in your campaign, and go to the Analytics tab, where you can find the information on your audience’s age, gender, language, and location. This data is usually shown in percentages:

In the image above, you can see the social data from the account of a foreign language school where students learn French as a second language. There is the distribution of social data by age groups, gender, and the data for location and language is shown in exact numbers.

You can find this data very useful when doing audience segmentation as well as in the initial stages of developing a target audience for your marketing campaign. It will help you be more precise in your estimations and make your campaign more personalized.

2. Find out Your Audience’s Content Preferences

Developing content for a marketing campaign is quite a challenge. Your goal is not just to represent your product well but also create something that will get your audience interested and engaged.

Social data can be one of the factors to help you produce content. And one of the ways it can contribute to the success of your marketing campaign is by helping you study the content preferences of your target audience.

For instance, you can study audience engagement for each of the content pieces you’ve posted. If we take TikTok as an example, there is an option of analyzing the social data on engagement through several metrics:

• views
• likes
• shares
• comments

You can also review the total engagement and the engagement rate for each of your posts.

However, if you want to go further and detect the content types that can potentially help you go viral, you need to study the historical changes in audience engagement. Here’s how it looks on TikTok:

The spikes in this graph could indicate the content that drove the most engagement. All you have to do is to browse through the posts and find the one that you uploaded that day and which drove you the most engagement.

Speaking about going viral, one more metric that social data can provide is your audience’s activity – the times when they usually check out your posts. Here’s how this graph looks on Facebook:

With this data, you can figure out where the best time is to post your content and schedule it appropriately. It will increase the chances that your audience will see your posts, and they will be more likely to share them, contributing to their viral potential.

3. Research the Most Popular Trends

Knowing which trends are currently the hottest in your industry right now is the key component of the success of your marketing campaign. And social data can help you figure out what’s trending in your industry and niche right now.

One of the ways social data displays trends is through hashtags. A hashtag is a transmitter of social data because people often use it to share the posts they like and also the content that is currently viral.

The best example of how hashtags display popular trends is TikTok. There, you can review the social data on the engagement for each hashtag and pick the one that’s trending right now:

No matter which platform you are going to involve in your marketing campaign, hashtags can help you get noticed and engage more people. However, when choosing the hashtags for your campaign, make sure they are relevant to the idea and content you want to share with your audience.

Wrapping Up

Creating a successful marketing campaign is quite a challenge. You have a lot of work to do to target the right people, engage them with personalized content, and turn them from leads into loyal customers.

Social data can be of great help here. You can use it at different stages of developing a marketing campaign, from researching your audience and its content preferences to finding the trends that will help more people notice your campaign. As a result, you will have a data-driven marketing campaign that has more chances to be successful.

About the author

Ryan is a passionate writer who likes sharing his thoughts and experience with the readers. Currently, he works as a digital marketing specialist; you can check his website here. He likes everything related to traveling and new countries.