Small Businesses Should Embrace Big Data

First, let’s start with the definition of big data. Big data means large sets of structured and unstructured data. It is so large and complex that regular data processing techniques do not work in dealing with this type of data sets. Generally, in the industry, the 3V model is used to describe big data. These 3Vs are; volume, velocity and variety.

Volume is related with how the data is stored. Businesses collect data from many sources such as sales transactions and social media and storing this continuous data was a problem in the past. Nowadays, big data technologies made storing data easier.  Velocity stands for real time data. Data streamed in real time must be dealt with immediately. Finally, variety refers to the different formats of data such as text, video, image and audio. Businesses should be able to arrange and store data in all formats.

Why You Should Embrace Big Data

Now that we have an idea about what big data is, let’s try to understand what big data means for businesses and why it is important for them.

• Understand the market conditions: Analyzing big data helps understanding current market conditions. For example; by analyzing customers’ purchasing behaviors, a business can find out the products that are sold the most and produce its future products according to this trend. As a result, it can get ahead of its competitors.
• Understand customers better: A business can understand its customers better with the help of big data analysis. It can predict what its customers want in advance and provide them a better service in addition to better products. Also, businesses can minimize customer complaints easily using big data tools, since these tools can automatically detect negative comments on social media. As a result, you can act promptly.
• Control your online reputation: Big data tools can do sentiment analysis. Therefore, you can get more feedback about who is saying what about your company. If you want to monitor and improve the online presence of your business, then, big data tools are a must-have for you.
• Cost Savings: Implementing big data tools may be expensive at the beginning but it will eventually save you a lot of money. Big data tools reduce the burden of IT staff, since they are real time systems. Therefore, you can use these resources somewhere else. Also, storing large amounts of data is much easier using big data technologies but more importantly, the data you store will be accurate because big data tools has greatly reduced the risk of inaccurate data.

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This article, "Small Businesses Should Embrace Big Data" was first published on Small Business Trends