Database Management for Social Media Marketing: What It Is and What You Need to Consider
We have all heard how knowledge is power, right? This statement stands right in all aspects of life. If you are a business owner, you already know that the more you know about your customers, the better you will be able to serve them. That means that having detailed knowledge about your customers will ultimately enable you to make your business more efficient, render your solutions more comprehensive and create genuinely satisfactory experiences for your customers.
There are many places a business can collect information from, especially in this hyper-connected digital era. One such channel is social media. As you are aware, there are various social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest and so on. Very few companies today would willingly keep social media out of their marketing strategy.
Why is social media marketing essential for businesses?
The answer is as simple as a company needs to go where its customers are. Moreover, today’s customers are on social media, if not anywhere else. You would want to be aware of where your customers are the most active, at what time they are most active, how they are interacting with brands, and what type of content they are engaging the most with. It is also vital to know what your target audience thinks about your brand. Social media is the place where you get this customer insight from. Increasing your customer base also gets comparatively more straightforward when you can directly interact with each member of your target audience on a regular basis. Customer insight is, of course, one of the critical requirements for success.
Leveraging the power of social media is not exactly easy. Although, having an excellently designed database certainly helps. A robust database and efficient database management can assist with capturing and data mining.
What is data mining?
If you are not familiar with the concept of data mining, this would be a good time to start reading up on it. Data mining is just one of the many ways of storing and analyzing data to make it more useful. With so many channels from where you are collecting information about your customers, both prospective and existing, it is easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the data. Before long, you start to realize that you are collecting a massive bulk of data but not being able to use it. The data is just piling up but not serving any real purpose or helping your business. Data mining is the process that makes it possible to analyze the collected data in a structured way so that you can easily access every bit of information, whenever it is required. The basic idea here is to get new information with the help of the data that you already have.
Many companies sit on a huge amount of data. Most of the times, they know the worth in terms of designing better customer experiences but do not know how to process that massive amount of data. It is much like sitting on top of a gold mine without being able to mine the said gold. With data mining, the process of sorting through large amounts of data, and identifying patterns in them can help these businesses understand customer behavior, customer preference, and customer trends. The first step towards data mining is database management.
What is database management and what are the factors that define a good database management system?
Well, managing your database is not just important; it is mandatory. Maintaining your database is vital as it enables you to store, categorize and handle multiple types of data in a single software system. It also helps to reduce functional cost. Without this management system, data would have to be scored, categorized and fetched manually, which would take much time. It would mean expenses for extra working hours.
Many things need to be done on a regular basis to make sure that your data center is functioning at the best of its capability. The first factor to focus on is security.
Security: IT threat is a real problem and is increasing day by day. A data breach does not just occur from the outside, but many organizations face significant security threats from inside too. That is why your first priority should be securing your database. You must consider both physical, infrastructural, natural (earthquake, hurricane) and technological (unauthorized access, human error) risks to your data. No matter what type of management system you are choosing, the first factor that you must ensure is the security of your data.
Functionality: The data analysis software that you are investing in must be able to meet your business requirements. The module should have the functionality to extract and filter data, insight and analysis feature, segmentation and modeling capabilities, automation, predictive strategy, campaign planning, return on investment (ROI) management.
Integration: The system has to integrate well with other software systems that you are already using. Either the integration can be done directly to specific software, or there can be an open source code that your system integrators can use.
Usability: You also need to consider how user-friendly this system is going to be. Whether you are going for a drag and drop execution or a more complex system, it should be easy to use for all the members of your IT team.
There is still the matter of hosting. While many companies go for a database that is entirely on-premise, others go the cloud way. You can choose the hybrid Cloud option for the best of both worlds. Make sure the system that you are going for has a cutting-edge visualization and reporting system so that you can view all your data in a highly detailed visual format. Do consider the cost and sustainability factors too. You can consult a database expert to understand which software would serve your requirement the best before you invest in one.
Author bio:
Sujain Thomas is a database expert who works with many reputed digital marketing firms. She emphasizes the implementation of database management practice to ensure that a business can leverage all the information it has to the best of its capability.