The Challenge

Client struggling to find the right way to reach customers via social platforms. Requested a market insight to figure out the priority list of social platforms and where to focus their resources.

We are going to start data collection based on the below aspects.

market-insight

Data Collection Process

The problem is complex. Most of the data is not available. The client had identified the 8 largest players in the industry, so we use this as a starting point.

The source of the data is online, but not all is so easily available. As the client requested we are not allowed to share names so the company names will be A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H.

As usual we have a high amount of social activities so we have to automate the data collection method. Hopefully almost all platforms provide API (application programming interface) which is really helpful to reach and collect huge amounts of data.

STEP 1

Data collection

Check the API documentation and create Python scripts.

STEP 2

Data cleaning

Collect the data from platforms. Clean and normalize.

STEP 3

Evaluation

Choose a visualization method and evaluate the results.

STEP 1

Data collection

Award National

Social Activity

We use the API interface and Python language the make our work faster and focus our time and resources to data analysis process. Go through all the social platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter. We are able to collect all the relevant information regarding posts, likes, comments and shares without connecting to business platforms.

About the results we will talk later, but the interesting point is that we lucky to to business in 2024. We are able to get insight to our competitors business without breaking laws and spent a huge amount of money. The public social life can tell us a lot about our customers. Of course the platforms business insight can provide more relevant information, but these charts do not provide the big picture and compare them to competitors activities.

Web Activity

During web activity we collected information about the competitors website. Usually analyzed the blogging activity. But there are also another aspect next to the blog activity, for example personalization, email list building, sms list building. It is mostly manual work but give us a good picture about the marketing activities of the companies.

 

SEO

For page SEO analysis Google help us out. We are looking for answers to the following main questions:

  • Average keyword ranks?
  • How many keywords listed in the top 10?
  • Number of backlinks?
  • Average Google search rank?

We put all the data into the table. With that information we able to rank the companies on a new way.

Revenue

As companies, finding revenue is a relatively simple task. We have collected the previous 5 years’ margins from open databases. In addition to collecting and normalizing the data, we can also observe trends, such as whether the firm is in a growth, stagnation or decline trend.

Follower Insight

Follower insight is a by-product of social analytics. We have previously collected the necessary information via APIs.
More important than the number of followers is their activity, likes and shares. In addition, we also performed a so-called sentiment analysis, where we looked at how positive or negative the comments were.

STEP 2

Data cleaning

Traffic

Why is the data dirty? And why does it need to be cleaned?

Actually it is not and it is not necessarily necessary. It’s just that it’s worth tailoring it to your specific purpose. But we have to keep in mind that the more we touch the data, the more it gets distorted. Raw data is not really suitable for analysis, especially visual analysis. That is why we rely on statistics as well as data cleaning.

Some data points are too high, such as the number of website visitors, others are too low, such as the number of Facebook comments. To make tshe two data comparable, the data must be normalized. This puts the numbers on a logarithmic scale, which helps you to orientate and visually understand the results.

STEP 3

Evaluation

Sales Chart

So, we have finally reached the part where we can reap the fruits of our labour. Data collected and cleaned. We have chosen an unusual way of visualization. However, this chart shows the results of our analysis better and more clearly than any other. It is called a network visualization, typically used to show the relationship between data points. In our case, network visualization is not the most straightforward, but it is indeed very worthwhile. Here is the result.

You can see the companies in the outer circle. Our client is “A company”. In the inner circle you can see the different points of comparison.

Let’s start with the inner area. The size of the circles indicates how much emphasis is placed on the aspect under scrutiny. The top 3 platforms are:

  1. Instagram
  2. YouTube
  3. Facebook

The thickness of the lines shows the relationship between the platform and the company. The thicker the line, the more active the company is on the platform.The size of the circles represents the size of the enterprise (turnover, number of employees). Therefore, the top 3 firms are:

  1. G company
  2. H company
  3. B company

As you can see, our client is not in the top 3, but that’s why they came to us. Their medium term goal is to get on the podium and to do that they need to see and understand the competition.

Let’s start with the common points. Twitter and Pinterest are not used by any business. As European companies, Twitter is understandable but Pinterest has huge potential. Therefore, the first thing we suggest is to launch Pinterest as a new platform.

SEO takes up very little space in the picture. What’s interesting is that G company spends the least on SEO, but more on Instagram and Facebook, so we can conclude that the majority of their customers come from paid ads, which in turn hurts their profitability in the long run.

The activity of followers is roughly the same. There are certainly spikes for certain posts, but this is not significant in the long run.

Surprisingly few company use a blog. F company has the strongest blog section. They are a relatively new company whose primary strategy may be content production.

Tiktok is only used with our client and G company. But G company uses much more resources than platform. It is worth increasing the number of posts on this platform as well, as competition is lower and attention is less divided.

 

Conclusion

We propose the following priority list for our client:

  1. Tiktok
  2. YouTube
  3. Pinterest

Of course, in addition to the following recommended platforms, they should also maintain the number of Instagram and Facebook posts.
But if they spend the next period focusing on the recommended platforms, they will most certainly increase their customer base.

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