How to Use Social Data to Launch a Successful Marketing Campaign

• By Ryan Pell
• 14-06-2022
• Social Media

Social media networks help businesses reach millions of people. According to Statista, Facebook alone has 2.9 billion users, making it the most popular social media platform:

However, besides reach and opportunities to increase brand awareness and recognition, brands also get access to valuable social data that can help them grow and improve.

In today’s guide, we put together everything you need to know about what social data is, where to find it, and how to use it to launch a successful marketing campaign.

Let’s dive in!

What is Social Data?
Social data is metadata that includes information social media users share publicly. With social data, you can learn the following details about the audience subscribed to you on social media:

Demographics - age, gender, location, language, job, marital status, income, etc.
Psychographics - needs, interests, hobbies, etc.

Social data also includes comments, likes, and shares. All this data leaves a digital footprint. Social media platforms collect and categorize it, helping brands understand their target audience better and adjust their content strategies to meet the needs of their followers.

Where do you find social data?
If you have a registered Business or Creator account (depending on the platform), you will have access to the Analytics tab. On Facebook and Instagram, it’s called Insights, and on LinkedIn, it’s called Analytics.

Now, let’s see how you can use social data in different ways to build a successful marketing campaign from the bottom up.

1. Create a More Detailed Target Audience Persona
A target audience persona is a description of a typical member of a group a business is trying to target with marketing efforts and promotions. We’re not going to go into much detail, but to put together this persona (also known as ideal customer profile, or ICP), you need demographic and psychographic data.

Obviously, social data can be of great help here since it covers the demographics and psychographics of your followers. If you’re about to launch a campaign that will also involve social media channels, you can take advantage of this data to make your target audience more segmented.

Built-in analytics tools on social media can provide you with demographic data on your followers. Here’s what this data looks like on Facebook (to access it, go to Insights and choose the People tab):

This data lets you explore the gender and age ratio of your followers, the languages they speak, and where they come from. It’s also possible to see the demographics of the people you’ve reached with your content - you can use this data when launching a PPC campaign on Facebook or any other social platform.

2. Optimize Your Content Strategy
The success of a social media strategy depends on the quality of content you post. It helps you build relationships with your followers and grow your authority as a brand.

Your followers also react to your content, and their reactions come in the form of data. If certain content resonates with them, they will comment on, like, and share it more. You can track down this content and use the best-performing types in your next marketing campaign to boost its performance.

Social media platforms collect the data on your followers’ content preferences and usually depict it in the Reach and Engagement metrics. Here’s how it looks on Facebook - you can see Reach and Engagement per each post:

You can go through this data, pick the content that has the best performance and create a similar one for your campaign. As for the content type, Facebook also breaks down your audience’s content preferences to tell you what they like to see from you the most:

Also, don’t neglect the comments under your posts, as it’s exactly what helped Preply, a popular language learning app, add some engaging content pieces to its arsenal. In particular, after doing some audience research on social media, the company developed its study time calculator. The intent behind it is to help Preply’s target audience understand how much time they would need to learn a foreign language to a specific level. The company came up with this content idea after seeing many comments addressing the problem this calculator solves.

So, from this example, you can see how valuable social listening and tracking social data is for your content strategy. It can help you facilitate trust between your brand and its target audience, and what matters more than that?

3. Identify the Most Appropriate Time to Share Your Content
One more example of how you can use social data to improve the performance of your marketing campaign is by analyzing when your followers are the most active.

Social media platforms track the activity of your followers and update it in real time. They do it by monitoring the times when your followers interact with your posts the most. As a result, you can get access to the following graph (example from Facebook):

As you can see from this graph, the best time to post for the company owning this data is at 10 AM. This is when its audience is the most likely to notice a new post and interact with it. So, without a doubt, this data is very valuable to the success of your campaign.

Wrapping Up
Social data is a powerful fuel for any marketing campaign. When used right, it can help you:

Build an ideal customer profile and segment your audience
Find the right content that will interest your followers
Identify the appropriate time slot to get more engagement and reach

Hopefully, our small guide will be of great help to you during the launch of your next marketing campaign. And, if you want to learn more on this topic, make sure to check out our blog!