Big Data and Facebook: How does it help in improving customer experience?

Have you ever wondered that while you are posting your pictures on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, etc. and you begin to tag others in the pictures, you automatically start getting their names? Is that all coincidence? Not really. The face recognition and image processing tools allow Facebook to suggest to you people for tagging to your posts. Similarly, huge amounts of information can be collected from the posts you like, repost, or comment on. Your every action on any social media platform is under close examination and provides plenty of data each second.

The data and insights that are being collected from your various social profiles are termed as the social media data or commonly known as social data in terms of big data. It plays a major role in gaining a better understanding of the customers and their preferences for any company, startup, or business, be it big or small. With the aid of social data, you get insights into people's verdict and opinion about your product, company, and services.

You can gather statistics and numbers to examine your social media strategies and henceforth, invest according to the likes of your targeted audience.

Use of social data in enhancing customer experience

Social media data can be used in wondrous ways such as segmenting the audience based on their preferences, offering them personalized offers and sales, and creating or managing content the way they want.

Several third-party companies monitor and analyze what their users and customers think about the company's products and services and accordingly mold themselves to provide a great customer experience. This way you can do experiments and innovations with your strategies, utilize costs effectively and strengthen your brand.

Facebook using Big Data

There are several social media platforms with which a user interacts daily. Facebook is one of the oldest platforms that hold more than 50% of the preferences of the audience. It relies on open-source frameworks for collecting the data and analyzing it. Tracking cookies of their users is a very common practice used by Facebook. The sites you visit while you are logged into Facebook can be tracked and hence you get ads accordingly.

Similarly, the posts or pictures you like, share, and comment on are also monitored. Once you like a post of any particular brand or company, you starting getting its advertisements while browsing the internet.

Just imagine that you liked a post of Dominos pizza while browsing your Facebook and after some time you go to some other site, maybe for reading a technical article, and you start getting ads of delicious pizzas. All of this happens by processing and analyzing your social data and provide you promotions and services consequently.

Once you get an idea about the preferences of your customers, you end up providing them what they wanted in a user-friendly manner. You can invest your time, money, and efforts in such a manner that you make good profits as well.

Once you hit the right spot in your customers' hearts, you open gates for a larger possibility of business. You earn their priorities by giving them premium services. The customers' feedback filled with appraisal will be reflected on their social profiles as well, thereby increasing the reach of your market. Facebook itself has been using big data very effectively in the past few years and giving innovative things to try to its users. You would have seen several "Friendversary" for you and your friend, celebrating your friendship on Facebook. They allow you to reshare it and celebrate it with the greater audience. Likewise, you get a similar video on your birthday, showcasing your posts, numbers of likes, and comments that you would have got in the last year.

For the 2010 midterm elections, you got the "I voted" stickers for your profile pictures, and spread more awareness about voting and elections. Facebook used deep learning tools for the recognition of faces in any post to show their names while tagging them and even letting the other person know about it as well.

The final words:

Although there were various ways in which big data customized the lives of its user but even faced a few drawbacks as well. People were not really supportive of their personalized choices being used by Facebook for any other purposes and even complained about their privacy settings being altered. The face recognition which was being done by Facebook also faced several issues, as people were not keen on allowing their face to be detected by any process and violating their privacy.

Big data solutions are tools which when used effectively can yield great results to businesses in the aspect of predicting their customers, financing their costs, making profits, and managing the ever-increasing data for providing great experiences to the customers and for themselves as well.