Augment Business Interactions with Social Media Analytics
Today social media to a great extent is used as a platform not only to socialize but also to seek opinions, make recommendations, and assert views. The popularity of social media is substantiated by Gartner forecasts on social media revenue. According to Gartner, Global social media revenue would reach $16.9 billion in 2012, up 43.1 percent from 2011 revenue of $11.8 billion. The social gaming market also shows an upward trend with Gartner expecting its revenue to reach $6.2 billion in 2012. This highlights the importance of social media analytics.
Social media analytics is defined as “the practice of gathering data from blogs and social media websites … and analyzing that data to inform business decisions.” Social media analytics is important today as one in every ten internet visits end on a social network.
Though the different websites in the social space were first built with the aim of connecting people, it is now powerful platforms for persuasion. A growing number of people now use social media to share opinions, make recommendations and seek guidance and direction. This is because compared to other forms of advertising such as TV ads, Newspaper ads, online video ads, online banner ads, sponsored ads and so on; word-of-mouth advertising plays a significant role in the decision-making process. Hence, a greater percentage of social media users trust completely/somewhat recommendations from friends and family, above all other forms of advertising.
In such a scenario, it would come as a shock that only a very few enterprises have actually made social networking a part of their marketing strategy even though they realize its importance in augmenting business interactions. A recent survey conducted by the Center for Complexity in Business (CCB) at the University of Maryland substantiates it. In this survey it was found out that most enterprises do not have a clear cut idea as to the concept of real time analytics and they do not have a strategy for investing in social media analytics tools that support big data analytics.
With Gartner including social media in its top 10 strategic technology trends for 2012, it is high time that enterprises give social media the importance that it deserves.
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