Much of the value that social networks offer marketers and advertisers is still untapped, locked in what is known as unstructured data, the billions of user-generated written posts, pictures, and videos that circulate on social media.
So far, social networks have only mined the tip of the iceberg in data terms — information such as likes, dislikes, occupation, location, and age.
That leaves a lot of other social activity that hasn't been parsed yet. More than 90% of data was unstructured in 2010.
Recently, Facebook announced a new Shazam-like feature that will recognize what music a user is listening to or what TV show they're watching and prompt them to include the information in a post they're writing. This is an example of how Facebook is turning unstructured data — lots of people are already writing about the TV shows they're watching but Facebook can't easily capture the info — into structured data.
In a recent report from BI Intelligence, Business Insider's subscription research service, we show how social networks are in a race to innovate in areas like "deep learning," cutting-edge artificial intelligence research that attempts to program machines to perform high-level thought and abstractions. These advances are helping social networks and their advertisers glean insights from the vast ocean of unstructured consumer data. Thanks to deep learning, social media has the potential to become far more personalized. New marketing fields are quickly emerging, too: audience clustering, predictive marketing, and sophisticated brand sentiment analysis.
Audience targeting and personalized predictive marketing using social data are expected to be some of the business areas that benefit the most from mining big data — 61% of data professionals say big data will overhaul marketing for the better, according to Booz & Company.
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In full, the report:
- Provides an easy-to-understand explanation of artificial intelligence and the various subsets of the field that are applicable to social media data.
- Includes interviews with artificial intelligence experts that reveal how advanced machine learning systems are today, and how different social networks are leveraging this powerful technology.
- Unpacks which types of social media data will be filtered through machine learning and how difficult it will be to process the different kinds of data.
- Gives examples of how artificial intelligence will improve social media ROI and revolutionize digital marketing and advertising.
The report is full of charts and datasets that can easily be downloaded and put to use.