If you're a retailer, it's important to know what your customers are saying about your product. You should be soliciting direct feedback from them when they actually make purchases, but it's also critical to keep in mind what they say to each other. A lot of those consumer-to-consumer conversations happen via social media platforms, a reality that many companies haven't properly adapted their Big Data strategies to.
A social discovery company called 8thBridge investigated these findings in a survey of over 800 retailers. The businesses were judged based on their usage of seven different social platforms, namely : Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Google+ and Vine. For evaluating how well the companies questioned were leveraging social media, 8thBridge looked at traffic, brand awareness and social lift to get a picture of just how much customers were taking to the web to engage the brand.
What researchers found was the companies were still failing to collect enough social information to make a move to Big Data plausible. While most companies have a Facebook presence, virtually none are deriving any real traffic from Instagram and Twitter: under 10 percent saw a spike in visits from the latter, and barely 6 percent saw a bump from the former. This suggests that there is a large gap between the potential of social media engagement and the reality.
For an enterprising company, this information represents an opportunity. Oversights by your competitors in adoption of Big Data mean that working with FileMaker developers could have an even more profound effect on your ability to convert sales. There is a strong inherent value of being first in your field, so adopting these principles early could mean big profits.