With passage of time, user sophistication has increased and people are paying greater attention to the end usage of their data. If you are keen to build the reputation of your brand, it is vital that you take your customers into confidence and win their trust. 

Social media in all its incarnations – Facebook, Twitter, Review sites, forums and other interactive online platforms – provide a fair sense of user sentiment. Companies should to be able to grasp it not only to fine tune their marketing strategy, but also to improve products and services. In a new socialized form of advertising, target users will receive messages from advertisers on basis of what they watched, listened to, or read. So a concert promoter might try selling you tickets to the upcoming event of your favorite singer/ band in your city, or nudge you to get his/ her new album.

This is made possible because of the fact that social networking platforms gather a whole lot of data marketers can use to customize the message, run promotions and come up with offers for users. It’s easy to see the potential and power of this data. The profile data can be used for disseminating personalized content, creating targeted ads, and building more meaningful customer relationships. However, some work must be done up front to know how to use it in ways that are both useful and responsible for users. They become sensitive about online privacy when they fail to understand what kind of information that they are sharing, and for what purpose.

So the challenge though is how to ‘read’ and analyze the vast pool of information in order to locate meaningful patterns in it and use the same as guide for corrective actions, without antagonizing your target audience. This is absolutely critical because the increasing popularity of social media means that marketers can win their trust so that they feel comfortable when logging into your website using credentials from a networking account.

The data can be thoroughly studied to get a precise snapshot of the behaviors of your prospective consumers.  Once you work with experts to map a broad customer profile, it becomes easier to develop an effective social media strategy. For example, classifying it into certain domain-specific categories, it can be grasped how social participation tends to vary among your customers – on basis of geographic, gender and economic considerations. This will allow you to formulate a well-targeted social strategy.

Product and content recommendations driven by social profile data are considered useful to the site user, and not intrusive in nature. There might be multiple data points, which intersect to in any way makes it difficult to suggest how it was derived anyway. To conclude, social profile data presents a great scope for marketers to build and sustain personalized relationships with key users.