It is clear that many organizations in the sub Saharan Africa are struggling to keep up with the fast changing continental technological trends. There has been a change on how businesses conduct their operations because of globalization, as entities seek to conduct operations in line with those of the outer world. The major struggles come in the understanding the change in consumer behavior, policies in place for business regulations and the disruptive technologies such as Big Data.
However, it is encouraging to note that executives across Africa have released that their organizations should be able to respond positively to the needs of transformational changes. Big Data as one of the main disruptions happening is on the spotlight and has been the focus for organizations that seek to maximize their profits and efficiency of the organization.
With the increased usage of social media, organizations should ignore it at their own risk as social media has stood as powerful tool to reach out to consumers. Therefore, organizations that are able to integrate their social media with big data have the benefits of accessing valuable data that is harnessed for business purposes. As the name goes, Big Data is huge chunks of data collected and stored for analysis.
Social Media has many benefits to institutions both profitable and non-profitable. It by far being a source of unstructured data, anyone needing to information to analyze and draw conclusions about a specific topic has the ability of collecting and analyzing views, comments, likes, tweet replies, tweets and many other types of engagements that happen on the different social platforms.
The significance of social media as a platform that offers interaction between companies and their potential clients has been evident from the fact that Facebook alone has been able to attract more than 2 billion users every month a figure that is about more than 25% of the world’s population. There are over 95 million photos and videos uploaded on Instagram, 4.5 billion likes on Facebook and 500 million tweets surfacing the internet every day. Living in the 21st century; a digital age, it is important for business entities to maintain their presence on the main social platforms such as Instagram, Twitter and Facebook in order to have a direct business to consumer engagement and interaction at a personal level. These staggering numbers are a wealth of information about all the needs your customers are looking for fulfillment – what they like, who they are and how people perceive your brand.
Social Media has made it possible for marketers to reach out to a large portion of their clients in the shortest time possible. All they need is to share it on the social network accounts and the content will reach out to the intended target market.
Artificial Intelligence and Big Data being still at the early development stages evolving gradually and the advancements that have made it possible for organizations to access and interact with data from the social networking platforms is a start to greater technological advancements.