Social media platforms contain a wealth of information about customers, competitors, and the market. And they often hold clues to emerging trends and allow those who watch to strike first and ride the trend longest. However, keeping up with the steady stream of data across social media platforms and deriving insights from them is difficult. This is where social media data mining can help.
Social media data mining allows businesses to listen to customers, observe competitors, and identify opportunities. In other words, it enables businesses to derive intelligible insights from the motley of data.
Social media data mining: A primer
Not all the data generated on social media platforms are useful, nor do they provide ready insights. Data mining is what helps in unearthing insights that are not readily available on the surface.
Social media data mining involves sifting through large amounts of raw social media data. The goal is to identify patterns, trends, sentiments, preferences and behavior of users, and commonalities or anomalies among them. The insights thus acquired can help design new strategies, introduce new products, improve customer experience, and adapt to the vagaries of the market.
Top 5 social media data mining techniques for businesses
Social media data mining has different purposes and accordingly different techniques. The following are the most prominent.
Keyword extraction
This refers to extracting specific words or phrases from social media texts. It can help identify salient words and themes in a topic. This can help get the gist without needing to manually sift through the whole corpus of text data.
Imagine you launch a new product and want to find out what customers are saying about it. What percentage of customers mention price and in what context? Do they mention competitors’ products? Are there specific complaints that pervade across large segments of customers? Keyword extraction can help you quickly find answers to questions such as these.
Keyword extraction can also help you identify what customers are talking about generally. By identifying words or phrases that are popular among your customers or target audience, you can tailor advertising so that the message resonates with them. This technique provides a suitable way to understand your customers, improve products and services, and keep track of trends and topics.
Sentiment analysis
Social media platforms are sort of public diaries where people express their sentiments and moods. Sentiment analysis is an important technique that can help you glean the opinions and attitudes of customers about specific products, events and topics, or your brand more generally.
This mining technique employs natural language processing to analyze the text of social media posts, comments, and other content. It considers factors like word choice, sentence structure, and emojis to determine the underlying sentiment behind the text. You can thus quickly assess the general or particular sentiments—positive, negative, or neutral.
Sentiment analysis is especially crucial for brand monitoring and crisis management. Since sentiments are socially contagious, failing to identify and address negative perceptions can be disastrous.
Advertising can also benefit greatly from sentiment analysis. A social media campaign can only be successful if it aligns with the sentiments of users. Targeting ads at those who are not enthusiastic about your brand or product will also likely result in waste. You also need to monitor sentiment evolutions before, during, and after the launch of your campaign to gauge its effectiveness.
Association rules
Association is a method to determine the probability of the co-occurrence of items in a group. Association rules describe the relationships between the co-occurring entities. It is mostly commonly used with transactional data for market basket analysis. For example, if it is found that the sale of cereal is closely associated with the sale of milk, then it is sensible to place them close to each other on the shelf. It is helpful in marketing, sales promotion, cross-selling, and discovering trends.
In social media data mining too, association rules are useful. Through algorithms like Apriori, association rules identify frequently co-occurring terms, hashtags, brands, or topics. The relationships are then expressed as rules, highlighting the strength and direction of the association.
Association rules can be applied to determine how likely a social media post is to be reposted, for example. They can help identify influential users and interesting posts. These pieces of information are of great value for activities such as advertising and viral marketing.
Predictive analytics
Social media trends are often unpredictable and usually short-lived. They are thus difficult to forecast. But with enough data, it is possible to predict what’s likely to happen. This is essentially what predictive analytics is. It uses historical and current data to predict upcoming occurrences or actions.
The technique involves identifying trends and patterns in a given dataset and making generalized predictions from them. Predictive analytics is not merely finding associations between events or data points but also predicting outcomes.
This mining technique can help understand customer behavior, anticipate trends, and predict user action.
Classification
In social media data mining, classification involves identifying the category or the class of each instance in a dataset based on its features. It helps categorize chaotic data into meaningful groups. The classification can be binary or multi-class. In binary classification, instances are grouped into two classes—for example, “positive” or “negative”. Multi-class classification involves more than two categories.
Customer perceptions of a product or a social media campaign can be classified as positive, negative, or neutral based on their language. Classification may also be based on customer characteristics such as age, location, preferences and values, and behaviors.
Getting started with social media data mining
More people are joining social networks and people are spending more time on social media platforms. This offers plenty of opportunities for gathering data and insights into customers and about products and brands. But tapping into them is a challenge.
The first major hurdle is gathering relevant data. Though data are abundant, collecting and processing them is challenging, requiring expertise and much time. Social media data mining services provided by data mining companies can help get around this obstacle.
Another obstacle is utilizing and analyzing the data. Segmenting the audience, discovering insights, identifying patterns and trends, and drawing inferences involve complex machine learning algorithms and natural language processing. These then employ one or more data mining techniques to perform a specified task. The techniques outlined here are some suitable ones that businesses can employ in their social media data mining projects.
