Social Media Data: Best Social Media Datasets & Databases

Who Uses Social Media Data and For What Use Cases?

Social media data is useful for researchers, marketers, sales professionals, and agencies for a variety of reasons, thanks to its ability to provide deeper behavioural insights about audiences and how they engage with a brand. Sales professionals can use these learnings to craft personalised conversations with prospective leads, while researchers can understand how people respond to the latest trends or news. Collecting social media data is crucial to make business decisions with confidence and optimise processes throughout departments.

Social media data can be analysed for the following use cases:

Manage Your Brand’s Public Perception

One common use of social media data is to increase brand visibility and manage your brand’s overall perception in public. Every time your company is mentioned online, you can instantly know how and when customers are sharing and discussing your brand. With the support of a social media data provider, you can utilise tools such as real-time notifications and signals to be made aware of important mentions and act quickly where necessary.

Leverage Key Influencers Effectively

A valuable asset of social media data is discovering how to build relationships with social media influencers (people that are known and relevant to your target audience). Such influencers can become powerful advocates of your brand and are a proven avenue to enhance your exposure. Accessing social media data allows you to identify fitting influencers to work with and consequently monitor your audience’s engagement with them. This will increase the chance of finding the audiences with the highest purchase intent.

Create Tailored, Engaging Content

Customer behaviour and perceptions are constantly changing. The more information you have to understand your audience, the better you can create authentic content that is tailored for them, compelling them to click, share, and convert. Recognising the needs, interests, and pain points of customers enables you to build a personalised experience for those who interact with your profile. For example, if your audience is frequently showing interest in a certain topic, you can keep them engaged by serving them similar content. The tone and phrasing of content will vary depending on the demographic for which it is intended, which is why having this data in the first place can save time and effort.

Benchmark Your Brand’s Performance

Businesses can harness social media data to identify and monitor key trends in their industry. Even if your brand is not directly involved, it is worth keeping an eye out for emerging patterns and potential challenges in the industry. Social media data shows the size of your online presence and how frequently customers are talking about you and your competitors, allowing you to compare how your brand is performing in comparison with others. Brand perception is particularly important since every interaction the customer has with your brand can be a deciding factor in their choice to purchase from you or your competitors.

What Are Typical Social Media Data Attributes?

This table summarizes the key attributes of social media data and their benefits for enhancing marketing strategies and audience engagement.

How is Social Media Data Typically Collected?

Brands gather social media data around the clock. Raw data gained directly from social media sites are internally combined with analytical tools to provide a holistic overview that allows you to view and compare statistics. A data point is created every time someone engages with your brand by liking, sharing, or commenting. Beyond this raw data, social media providers offer the possibility to gauge the success of every post and campaign by tracking clicks and leads from your social media activities. This proves useful when identifying the most optimal channels and content for your brand, so you are able to tie social media performance to ROI.

How to Assess the Quality of Social Media Data?

With high-quality social data that is aggregated and evaluated correctly, companies can target advertisements to the people who are most likely to buy their products or services. In order for social media data to be useful, you need to be able to see the action as it unfolds. Given the rapid pace at which information spreads over the web, social media data can be time sensitive; what’s relevant on one day may no longer be interesting the next day. Effective visualisation tools and analytics provided by a social media data vendor will enable you to digest the raw data that is readily available on these networks, draw correlations, and turn them into actionable strategies.

How is Social Media Data Typically Priced?

Social media data is often available as subscription packages, however this would depend on the individual social media data provider. Purchasing these packages enables you to analyse audience behaviour across the different social media platforms and understand what works for your brand.

What Are the Common Challenges when Buying Social Media Data?

A challenge experienced with social media data is that some users may choose not to provide certain information points such as their location, which renders information sets incomplete. This gives advertisers an incomplete profile to work with if they are missing one key section of the user’s profile that is essential in decision-making. A further obstacle is that some user profiles on social media sites are actually fake accounts as opposed to real users, which can skew information and make datasets unreliable.

Is Social Media Data Secure?

Social media datasets are designed to exclude private or sensitive user information, focusing only on publicly accessible data. Providers use secure delivery methods, including encrypted APIs and SFTP, to protect the integrity and confidentiality of the data during transmission.

Our recommendation: Ensure the provider adheres to privacy laws and uses secure delivery methods to mitigate any potential risks.

What to Ask Social Media Data Providers?

• Do they offer adequate security measures to ensure that your customers’ data is safely stored?
• Are the social media datasets made up of complete information
• Can the social media data be integrated with my company’s wider marketing ecosystem including CRM and BI platforms?

How Is Social Media Data Delivered?

Social media data is available in various formats like CSV, JSON, XML, and XLS. Delivery options include real-time APIs for dynamic updates, batch processing for bulk data, and on-demand access for specific queries. Update frequencies range from hourly to yearly, depending on your requirements.

Our recommendation: Opt for APIs if you need continuous updates or batch files for detailed historical analysis.

How Much Does Social Media Data Cost?

Costs for social media data depend on volume, platform coverage, and update frequency. Providers may offer pricing models such as one-off purchases, monthly subscriptions, or usage-based fees. Many also provide free samples to help you evaluate the dataset’s relevance.

Our recommendation: Start with a free sample to verify that the dataset meets your use case and quality expectations before committing to a subscription.