In the world of social media, things can become overwhelming. With tons of social media metrics to analyze, report and measure, refining information can become increasingly tedious. This is where business intelligence can pay off and help significantly. However, business intelligence maybe one term, but for social media, it is a set of tools, that helps analyze data and provide useful insights. But before you jump the bandwagon and start downloading various tools, here is a starter guide to your woes. Learn the basics of business intelligence to revamp your digital strategy:
First: What is business intelligence?
In a nutshell, business intelligence is more of a process rather than a tool. It can help analyze and refine large amounts of raw data collected via social media. The insights collected via business intelligence can help managers make informed decisions. However, it isn’t just one tool. But an amalgamation of a variety of tools. That could be software, application or techniques. Experts need to employ business intelligence, gather data and foremost discover patterns to make decisions.
Second: Business Intelligence is highly dependent on technology.
Business intelligence is driven via technology. The whole process of business intelligence where data is collected via internal and external sources. Then they are analyzed and refined using business intelligence tools. Software experts can then run queries on the refined results for better information. Once this is done, users and experts can derive tables or charts presented by business intelligence tools (MicroStrategy, Power BI, Cloudera). Finally, these results can be interpreted and decisions can be made.
Third: Difference between business analytics and business intelligence
Not a lot of people know but there are varying differences between both business analytics and business intelligence. Basically, business intelligence focuses on what happened in the past and what is happening in the present. The data provided or refined via business intelligence doesn’t provide any context related to future or predictive analysis. Basically, it uses raw data refines it into information and then provides important trends and patterns for businesses to use for decision making. This is also known as advanced and augmented analysis as per social media today blog. However, business analytics ensue tools that go beyond business intelligence and confer patterns related to the future. It may include data mining, predictive and statistical analysis. In a nutshell, business analytics can provide proactive solutions to problems and issues that you can face in the future.
Fourth: How you can benefit via business intelligence
The business intelligence process can help businesses significantly. They can help derive useful patterns and trends that can play an important role when devising a strategy. It can provide a varying degree of reasoning to support decision-making ultimatums. Business intelligence can further help convert tons of data into useful information and analysis. With this operational efficiency improves. Furthermore, by successfully interpreting information, business intelligence can help devise strategies to overcome strong competition or provide you with an edge over competitors. Also, it helps defines new revenue streams for the business.
As a foreword make sure to use both business intelligence and business analytics to support tactical decision-making and layout future plans.
