Extracting meaningful information from social media

Here is a real example of how an e-commerce company that sells furnitures makes use of social media data.

• Creates a Facebook page, gets followers, comes up with ads, pays Facebook to promote the ads and display the ads to potential customers. 

• Facebook provides data about how many of them viewed, liked, commented, shared and non-personal summarized demographic data to the furniture company through API’s. 

• Furniture company has automated jobs that access these API’s to collect data. 

• Then the story is the same, data is collected, arranged in a way it is suitable for reporting and analysis purposes and interesting trends and patterns are found by the data analysts and product owners, etc. 

• Company finds out how many (%) of those viewed, liked, commented and shared actually converted to a customer. 

• Based on learning, the next ad is created to target a specific group etc. 

• Goal is to increase sales. 

• Comments are also used for sentiment analysis for example to classify as positive, negative or neutral sentiment.