Social Media has become a very powerful form of reaching out to the public for all institutions. Whether it be for a government entity, church, civic group, university, or business, social media is how you spread information to the general public at large.  Facebook groups and company pages interact with the local community to get the word out on special deals or public events. 

This has become the way of communication for the twenty-first century.  If you are trying to promote a product or service and aren’t using social media, then you may as well not be in business.

Keep Up with Competition

Social media allows you to keep up to date on what your competitors are doing.  You can scrape a post about what their products, deals, services, etc. are doing.  With this information, you can take counteractions in your marketing campaigns.  Then you can make a better offer that out-does your competition.  This knowledge can make you the worst nightmare of your competitors.  Price scraping means that you can fully understand the supply and demand graph to find the equilibrium price sweet spot for your products or services. This is of significant importance to the highly competitive e-commerce industry as well as companies that serve local communities such as electricians, plumbers, mechanics, and the retail industry.  You will always be ahead of the game by keeping an eye on all competitors, learning their strengths and weaknesses. LinkedIn contains all the professional data for your competitors, allowing you to know their educational background and thus fully understand what you are up against.

Social Media Data is Critical for Startups

If you are wanting to start up a new company, first you must do market research in order to properly understand the market demand for the services or products you wish to offer. Understanding the current trends are of the utmost importance. You must understand the best geographical location to open up a store or office.  You must know how many other companies already offer this, and how they fare.  Social media is a treasure trove of this information.  Local Facebook group chats are where people discuss their needs and wants.  These conversations also discuss the quality of what the competition currently offers and the changes people want to see in the products or services of your chosen industry.  Only by centering your business plan around this data you can get off the ground with your idea and move on to be a thought leader in your field.

Better Customer Service

Knowledge is power, and nothing could be greater than getting into the heads of your customers. You can also use LinkedIn profile information to better understand your buyer persona at the professional level. This intimate understanding of your ideal customer helps understand how they think and cater to what would be the most appealing.  Customers will talk about their service experiences- both positive and negative- on social media. Knowing when customers give praise, this teaches you to understand what is pleasing to your buyer persona and to continue that course of action.  When the customer has a problem with your product or service and s/he starts to air this out on the internet, the results can be detrimental.  You need to be able to nip this problem in the bud.  But this can’t be done if you are ignorant of the criticism.

Social media scraping for your brand name informs you of problems that are cropping up.  Then you can give customer support that rectifies the situation and saves your professional reputation.  Good customer service is the difference between an enduring company that lasts and a “here today, gone tomorrow” company. Social media scraping gives a business the opportunity to understand that overall public perception of their company name.   This public feedback allows you to repair any problems you may have with the service that has previously gone unnoticed.  Repairing these problems will improve your image in the public eye.  You can analyze the attitudes of the public and turn your business into what customers want to see.  Only with this type of information can you can get into the head of your customers and build your brand into what is pleasing.

Is This legal?

As long as the scraping is done within certain parameters that don’t constitute fraud, and the purposes aren’t nefarious. By fraud, they don’t want fake accounts being set up for the purpose of scraping.  Many of these companies are also worried about data being used to compete with them.  So in short, don’t create fake people, don’t try to compete with the social media platform you are scraping, and don’t seek information for criminal intent.  For a complete understanding of these policies check here.  

Kids, Don’t Try this at Home!

Social media is like the universe, infinite.  Trying to dig through this stuff yourself would be like the Apollo 13 crew thinking they could explore the galaxy in their little moon lander!  Not only is it impossible to manually do, but even if you could, you would risk breaking a law or ethics code you were unaware of.  The professionals know what they are doing from years of experience and research. By going with professional data scraping services you don’t run the risk of any violations. Data scraping services are able to dig through social media platforms and extract that hard to find data that is crucial to your company (find out more here ). They search through profiles, groups, and a plethora of places too numerous to mention.   So by hiring third-party services to do this work for you, you not only obtain high-quality results that are invaluable to your business, but you avoid running the risk of getting into trouble. Please feel free to contribute in the comments section below.

Please feel free to contribute in the comments section below.

 


Image Source: Freepik