Social Media Analytics for Marketing: A Theoretical Framework

Social media has significantly influenced forms of communication in both private and professional life. Social media users leave digital footprints of their activity that can be used to analyze their behavior on an unprecedented scale. The process of discovering knowledge about the activity of social media users is called social media analytics. SMA uses advanced techniques to analyze patterns in social media data to enable informed and insightful decision-making. This is still a growing research area. Can information explored from social media create value and affect competitive advantage through intelligent marketing? In this paper, we present a theoretical framework that explains how and why companies create value with big social data. Due this we can specify our research goal as present the benefits of big social data analytics in company on the example of the company's marketing activities. To achieve this goal, we set the following research questions: What is big social data? What is the difference between traditional data analytics versus big data analytics? Then, based on the review of the three fields (brand perception, consumer psychology and social media data as a support for business analytics system), we showed the directions of using big social data in intelligent marketing. It turns out that social media analytic can introduce many benefits for the company via sentiment analysis, network analysis or expanding knowledge of consumer psychology. Based on such conclusions, empirical studies estimating the benefits of including the social media mining process should be carried out in the future.