The term “Big Data” is in vogue right now, but what does it really mean? Is Big Data too big to impact Small Business? How can your company (whether a startup or a Fortune 500) benefit from the industry of Big Data?

1.    Analyze Your Company’s Historical Data

Believe it or not, if your company has been operating for a year or more, you likely have a ton of “Big Data” sitting in your company records. If you’ve been keeping track of your sales in a ledger of some sort (excel, QuickBooks, etc.), then you have an excellent set of sales statistics to cross-reference with other information in your tool chest. Have you been keeping track of the promotions and sales your company runs? Do you know what times of day are the busiest for traffic on your website, or visits at your store? By pulling this information together and analyzing the impact of promotions, time of day and other variables on your sales numbers, you will have taken the first step towards analyzing the Big Data available to your company.

2.    Social Media and Small Business

There are tons of “how-to” articles that discuss creating a Facebook page for your company to engage customers. However, did you know you can see insights into what your customers are doing and how your social media presence is performing? Facebook, for example, will email you once a week with basic insights into how many Facebook users you’ve “engaged” with your Facebook Page. Each post has a small caption that tells you how many Facebook users have been “reached”, even though they may not have clicked on the post.

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Conference centers around the world have seen a dramatic increase in Social Media Conventions, focused on helping businesses engage their audience on the sites where we spend more than 5 hours a week updating statuses, commenting on cat photos and sharing pictures of our food. All of this interaction, when paired with even the simplest of marketing strategies, provides excellent statistics to compile into your company’s “Big Data” collection.

3.    Google, Bing and Yahoo Utilize Big Data to Assess Your Website

If you think Big Data isn’t important to your bottom line, guess again. All of the major search engines utilize Big Data to decide the relevance of your company’s website to what their users are searching for every day. If your company sells shoes, then having a site that has multiple products that meet a customer’s shoe needs is important. But is your site referenced by any other websites that hold authority in the world of shoes? Do you have information on your page that solves a problem for your customers?

Search engines use spiders to crawl your site and find out what information is available on it every day. To maximize your site’s reach, and increase organic traffic, you need to submit your site to be indexed by Google. Make sure your site stands out in the collection of Big Data by search engines and watch your bottom line soar!