Social Media Minus the Myths – Chapter 5 - The Value of User Profiling

This is a guest article by Advit Sahdev, Founder of the Online Digital Marketing Agency ODigMa. They specialize in social media marketingin India with special focus on Facebookbusiness communities. Read more about Advit here.Let me take a very interesting subject – One of the biggest Bollywood hits in recent times has a huge fan following on Facebook (I won’t reveal the name, but it’s not too hard to guess)

Now, let’s assume that this great movie production team decided to make a sequel as they want to leverage the tremendous brand that has been built & they also wanted to engage with people as they want to be active on Social Media in India.

They then decide to list down there marketing objectives from social media & one of the key marketing objectives that came out was, that this time, we will create the story of the movie keeping in mind the people who are the biggest “fans of the movie”.

Here is some of the data that they could use. I have collected some data around the user profiles of the people who are fans of these Pages. This data can help them understand “who loves and promotes their movie” as opposed to “who watched their movie”

Data point 1 – Understand region wise break up – You might have 20% of people in NCR watching the movie, but is that the set of people who will actively promote the sequel?

Data Point 2 – You want the story line to relate with the audience who will promote it the most, so will “relationship status” help you there? Here is some data that you might want to see and analyze

Data Point 3 – Who loves and promotes your movie more in terms of age and sex? Will that be a kep data point in terms of your online promotions and engaging with this active community – to leverage the power of word of “wall”?

It does not end here, you can do endless permutations and combinations – For e.g. you can slice and dice this data to understand that what is the common fan following between the movie hero or heroes (yes, this movie had multiple heroes) and the movie. You might want to understand the break-up of urban vs. rural men % by relationship status. You might want to understand what people talk about in these communities – there might be a dialogue that was not so great, but has picked up really well on social media. You might want to understand the message people took away from this movie, or how they related to it. Was the biggest selling point of the movie the star case, was it the story line, was it that it connected to a particular user (viewer) profile etc. You might want to understand when the users talk most about your movie – Is it during evenings, is it weekends or is it during a common positive sentiment.

The number of questions is endless and they are more and more mature and focused for every business. A mobile operator might want to know when his fans are most active on social media so that he can give them free talk time just 2 hours before that J

This is the power of data on social media and the power of user profiling. Companies need to start using it, to get much more valuable insights and in return, get higher yields.