Businesses have not been slow to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the new trends in social media. Websites such as Facebook and LinkedIn have become a resource for companies trying to test out a new product or promote their brand. However, social media is a field which most business managers and owners have simply not been trained in and this means that they often struggle to completely understand the marketing methods that work best in these fields. Often, they do no effective research and plow on with their promotions as they would with any other media outlet. Yet only a few minutes of careful social media analysis would have shown these businesses that you need to do something original, outrageous and cutting-edge to properly promote your business on websites such as Facebook.

One of the ways in which businesses can bring themselves up to speed on the latest trends in Twitter and other sites is by using Predictive Analysis to develop insights into correctly developing a marketing strategy for the hyper-networked world. There are many different types of analyses which your business can conduct, using methods such as Text Mining in order to discover which are the most popular trends currently appearing on Facebook.

Brand Insights

Of course, as with any other kind of market research, social media analysis needs to be carefully conducted in order to ensure the data is properly assessed. By understanding, for example, that Twitter posts will be over-emphasized due to the greater frequency of texts. Therefore, if you are trying to decide whether to promote your product more aggressively on Facebook or Twitter, you will need to weigh your data in favor of Facebook in order to adjust the results to show a correct percentage. All of this data weighting can be very difficult to perform and many companies struggle to manage their social media analysis effectively.

One of the best ways to use Text Mining in order to discover social media insights is by using a combination of words in order to get a better fix on trends. Single word searches will usually give you high results but without much context, so it is much better to perform social media analysis through the use of combined words. For example, recent searches suggest that personal branding is popular with readers of Facebook and Twitter, probably as this kind of branding relates to the kind of intimate marketing required of social media. This branding is also found in connection with Word of Mouth Branding, which is a very popular way of saying that you can get customers to your door through personal connections which former customers have, for example with friends and relatives.