The Next Precision Marketing: Social Network Analysis

Nowadays marketers and advertisers try so hard to capture their target audience’s behaviors and then place the marketing campaigns or advertisements in the path of the behaviors. There are already thousands of attempts that have been done by those most successful companies in the world. For example, Google key words helps marketers understand what their consumers real needs are, while Facebook ads are highly user-relative as the company collects and classifies its fans’ information and provides the automation match system to advertisers. Everything seems perfect, but what is the next upgrade for the whole system of precision marketing?

Based on what I have learned from this course, I would dare to say that the next big thing for precision marketing is social network analysis. The reason is simple: human beings cannot live without each other in the society, which means the social network is always existed and reflected individuals’ communication paths. That is to say, social network gives a shortcut for marketers to promote their products to not only the right person, but the right group. This advantage is special essential because in most cases, people tend to take a shot for what their close friends recommended, even though they have different interests. If marketers are able to identify what the group is, brands would reach out more potential consumers in every single buck, and we all know that it is much costlier to get a new consumer than to maintain an old one.

Before the analysis, marketers need to map out the social network of the target audience, which acquires to obtain a set of connection data. Fortunately, it is easy to get as most of the consumers have their own social media accounts, which leave a bunch of useful information for marketers to understand users’ behaviors. However, since social media platforms differentiate from each other, marketers should think about what the focus of the platforms are before they collaborate with the platforms. For instance, good friends tend to communicate via platforms like Whatsapp and WeChat, while business partners are more likely to use some other professional communication tools like Slack. So that may probably make an app like Yelp place its ads on WeChat but make Dropbox promote on Slack.

Obviously, there are dozens of merits of social network analysis. Are there any downsides? As we all known, privacy is one of the most serious issues for collecting user data. Would social network analysis face the same awkwardness? It could, but I am optimistic about that. Generally, big data is up for improving human’s quality of life. Now lots of people are willing to provide their personal information to make that happen. Looking at the trend of the rapidly increasing usage of social media, we know that individuals need social network indeed. Moreover, cookies have been already used for marketing and advertising for a couple years. Privacy issues have been recognized important but not fatal to settle out by the public. More importantly, marketers do not have to look through every consumer to ensure that their strategies work, which means only if they got above average amount of data sets that have been approved to use by the users, marketing campaigns would still succeed via social network analysis. Meanwhile, there is something tricky that should be noticed here: it is the social media platforms who often sell the user data but not the product providers, so that the marketers from provider’s companies do have less risks at terms of offending consumers’ privacy.

Overall, the upsides of what social network analysis brings are vital enough for marketers to boost their business, while the downsides are not killing its prospect. As technology booming out these years, marketing will go more and more customized and accurate for individuals, which is saying that social network analysis will become much more important than ever and, the next big thing!