How Should You Store Social Media Data
According to a 2018 report by DOMO, over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day. Data grows rapidly, and social media is one of the factors contributing to this data surge. The rise in data creation on social media can be attributed to internet users signing up to a social media channel, posting a tweet, status update, comment, or uploading a photo.
Businesses need to analyze all these different data sources to make important decisions. However, before they do so, the information should be gathered and stored in ways that are easier to access. Data repositories also need to be protected from cyber threats. Here is a brief look at the best practices for storing social media data.
1. Object Lesson
Data storage is usually determined by its use case. For example, a social media channel has to store data to be retrieved whenever users want to see it. This is known as the foreground copy. Some businesses want to store their social media in bulk for analysis and to gain useful insights. This is called the background copy.
Object-based storage is suited for foreground copy since object stores have the capacity in size and geographic distance to address specific needs like storing all tweets on a company’s VPN or storing all pictures on Facebook. These storage systems come with HTTP-based interfaces that put references on objects into the Websites used to display them.
Data bits have to be bundled into large files for analytical purposes for the background copy. For instance, for analyzing tweets, you need a big file to store all the tweets. Hadoop is an example of a data storage solution that deals with this type of analytics.
2. Slow Archives
It isn’t advisable to delete data that is rarely accessed in favor of the frequently used data. The best practice is to divide data into hot and cold sectors based on your business’s needs. The hot data should be given a fast response while assigning colder objects with lower response times.
3. Three-Tier System
Experts recommend splitting social media data into tiers: the in-flash tier, the on-disk tier, and the cold-data tier. One can transfer data from the in-flash to disk tier through basic caching.
Consequently, transferring information from the cold data layer involves shrinking large numbers of small objects into a few large objects. This ensures the old data tier isn’t overwhelmed with too many objects.
4. Bulk Up
Social data can amount to a lot of storage arrays. It’s usually advisable to offload bulk storage to Storage as a Service (STaaS). This is where a provider offers rent storage to a customer. Some cloud services that deal with STaaS are Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.
One of the reasons companies turn to STaaS is because buying storage capacity is expensive. Investing in new storage capacity isn’t feasible, especially if you don’t know how much data storage space you will need in the future.
5. Data Warehouse
Storing social media data in different tools, also known as siloing your data, can prevent you from retrieving key information for your marketing strategies. Since various tools collect and store information separately, changing services at any point will cause you to lose information.
Centralization of data sets overcomes the restrictions of data silos. This is also effective for analytics. When all your data is stored in one data warehouse, a number of business intelligence tools can provide valuable insights.
Wrapping It Up
Social media data, which consists of metrics like shares, comments, retweets, referrals, and conversion rates, is essential to your marketing strategy. It also provides vital information regarding your products, brand, and the views shared by your prospects and customers. Therefore, observe efficient and safe social media data storage techniques for the success of your marketing efforts.
