I’m often asked whether big data can provide the same opportunities for small businesses and independent traders as it can for big corporations. My answer: absolutely! While the average small business has less self-generated data than big players like Google or Facebook, this doesn’t mean big data is off limits. In fact, in many ways, big data is more suited to small businesses because they’re generally more agile and able to act more quickly on data-driven insights. Let’s look at some of the ways small businesses can make use of big data, which I have taken from my book Big Data for Small Business For Dummies.

Thanks to big data, small businesses can get a fuller picture of their customers – what makes them tick, why they buy, how they prefer to shop, why they switch, what they’ll buy next, and what factors lead them to recommend a company to others. Companies can also better interact and engage with customers by analysing customer feedback in order to improve a product or service and to manage the financial movements when you make check stubs online for a company. Useful data sources include traditional in-house data (like sales data and customer service logs), social media, browser logs, text analytics, and large, public data sets (such as census data).

Social media has become a particularly valuable source of data, making activities such as identifying niche markets and analysing customer feedback much easier and cheaper. Twitter – where almost all conversations are effectively held in public – is easier to mine than most platforms.