Big Data and Your Business

It seems that no matter where you go these days, people are talking about business—on blogs, social media, even by the water cooler—and eventually, you will hear about big data. The question is, is big data really relevant for your business? The answer is a resounding yes. Big data is useful for any organization that wants to better understand its audience and streamline its marketing accordingly. Let’s take a look at big data, what it is, and how it can help your business.

Big Data Defined
Big data means high volumes of information that can come from a variety of places, including Website metrics. Simply put, if you can’t easily enter the data in a standard spreadsheet because there is too much information, it is big data. It may look chaotic, but with proper handling and analysis it can yield valuable information for your business.

How to Use It
Marketing is where big data really shines. From social media posts, to blogs and monthly newsletters, big data can be used to give your members more of what they want to maximize your marketing efforts. So how exactly does it do that? Let’s look at an example.

Say your business makes regular posts on Facebook. If you examine the data regarding activity on your profile, you will be able to learn:

• Which updates are most popular
• Which updates lead to the most action
• What time of day is best for posting
• What topics your followers like best

Now, if you put all that information together, you have valuable insight on how to spend your time and efforts marketing on Facebook. Big data in action is about examining the available information and spotting patterns and trends that give you valuable insight into your audiences’ interests and behaviors.

How to Get Started
There are a lot of tools out there for managing big data, and plenty of training if needed, however you can get started with the tools already available to you. For example, if you want to know how visitors behave when they arrive on your Website, you can use your Website metrics to build up a picture and spot where people are most likely to leave, and most likely to stay. Now you can start working out what you need to do more of or less of to keep your visitors interested and stop them from clicking to another site.