How Is Big Data Changing Social Media Marketing Strategies?

Dokyun Lee, Tepper School Assistant Professor of Business Analytics, speaks about his research on advertising content and consumer engagement on social media.

Video Transcript

I'm very interested in the economic impact of what I like to call unstructured data — for example, texts and images in, say, e-commerce, social media settings, and how does that impact how people purchase, how consumers behave online?

The paper offers a lot of insights in terms of what social media marketers can do, and it also ties back to old marketing theories on the content of advertising and what kind of content works, which previously there has been a lack of easy data to study and lack of techniques like text mining, which can process large volumes of data and tell very large-scale engagement or reactions of consumers. Now we have that.

So the question is, a lot of firms are on social media and they are pushing status updates, connecting with consumers directly, sharing photos, sharing any information whether it's on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter. What they're after is, one, not only a direct lead to purchase perhaps, but second, also brand marketing — the long-term exposure of their brand connecting with consumers.

Their informative content is meant to bring direct path to purchase — so short-term goals — but they also have to do this brand marketing, which actually increases engagement. So, on platforms like Facebook, increased engagement means more future impressions. So, the paper tells you have to have a good balance between the two.