As social networks and social media have to play a prominent role in online marketing and advertising, the amount of available data regarding consumers has also exploded. SEO experts and other professionals can mine social media data and analyze that data to expand exponentially what they know about their typical customer or target audience. Accompanying these increased opportunities to gather information and apply it to current business operations is a greater need for education among IT professionals.

New tricks for turning data into insight

Because the opportunities provided by social media are so new to the industry, many IT professionals can benefit from building upon their current education and experience, either through attending an online school like American InterContinental University or other methods. Doing so can empower IT experts with a skill set that will only become more applicable as social media use increases.

In the current SEO market, the need for applications, software and other tech tools that can be used to analyze mined social media data is strong. But producing these tools so that they can be applied to various social network platforms — many of them new within the past few years — is no easy task. It requires a modern education in IT and the script writing skills to produce code that is applicable and relevant to SEO efforts.

IT professionals that are capable of writing script that extracts large amounts of data from social media sites, and then analyzes the data in ways that are relevant to SEO functions, are in high demand, and the faster current IT experts update their current skill set, the more valuable they will be to employers and clients.

Picking more than low-hanging fruit

Although many social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, provide basic data for analysis by users, this data is on its own limited in how it can help guide SEO efforts. External analysis is required to calculate more in-depth information, such as the number of social shares a website, link or post has, the percentage of referrals that lead to sales, the true audience reached by each piece of media published on social networks, and so on.

But knowing how to produce relevant script isn’t the only requirement of IT professionals. It’s equally important to understand how to apply these tools and how businesses want to develop their SEO strategy. So much data is available through social media that IT experts need to refine their focus in order to get quality data. In other words, you need to know what you’re looking for when you start digging through social media’s data offerings.

Basic social media data analysis tools are available as apps and other software. But for a serious SEO firm or any business trying to organically build their online presence, more complex, productive data mining and analysis is needed to provide an edge over the competition. Because the Internet age has allowed businesses to be more competitive in a global market, IT professionals can’t afford to overlook the value of building upon their IT skills, both as a service to their employers and as a means of remaining relevant in a rapidly evolving industry.