Drive Business with Social Analytics

Today the social gaming market is exploding with a whopping 81 million people playing each day while 49 million people playing multiple times a day. As for Facebook, more than 200 million people play games on Facebook. As more players play social games, they start spending money on virtual items, which over a period of time becomes a significant revenue stream. Besides, revenue from advertising is also growing exponentially. Moreover, with social game monetization opportunities existing, social media sites would continue to include social gaming on their networks. Therefore, it can be said that the social gaming industry has started to generate real revenues and a marketplace that could soon constitute a good chunk of the social e-commerce market.

This has been substantiated by a recently published Gartner report, which estimates that the social media revenue would go up by 43% to reach $16.9 billion in 2012 from 2011 revenue of $11.8 billion. According to this report, the largest source of social media revenue is advertising followed by social gaming. Social gaming revenue more than doubled between 2010 and 2011. And as per the report, the social gaming market is also expected to reach $6.2bn in 2012 with revenue from subscriptions reaching $278m.

According to Neha Gupta, a senior research analyst at Gartner, “,…… Social media sites are becoming more innovative in their ad products to attract marketers, ……….. Social media sites enable marketers to target ads to discrete consumer segments by unlocking the interconnected data structures of users that include lists of friends, their comments and messages, photos and all their social connections, contact information and associated media……….. Social networking sites should deploy data analytic technologies that interrogate social networks to give marketers a more accurate picture of trends in accordance with consumers' needs and preferences."

With social gaming and social commerce providing a unique opportunity for companies to understand the customers’ activities, behaviors and demographic profiles, enterprises must start investing in social media analytics tools

• Track data across many social platforms
• Tap into the customer behavior insights trapped in the ever-expanding social media data
• Get valuable, actionable user insights on a real time basis

Learn more about :  social intelligence

Putting Social Media Analytics Tools into Use

Over the past few years the way the social web and media has evolved, it can no longer be described as a channel of directionless interactions and idle networking as it was claimed by few sometime back. Multiple brands today participate in various social media platforms not only to make their market presence felt online but also to make the most of the their online presence in business generation or awareness creation. This can be done in many ways, such as gathering customer feedback, audience polls and conversations by the way of arranging contests and sharing important FAQ’s for a certain product or service. In addition to that, there are brands that also have their own blogs and publish articles with important data, which in turn is shared by an user if he/she finds it interesting.

However, if you want to leverage the best results of social media monitoring then, you must use efficient techniques to measure your online efficiency. Today there are advanced analytics through which the social media data is collated. It is essential to enable an enterprise arrive at efficient online campaign leads and marketing strategies efficiently in the social media marketing sphere.

Today most organizations need to focus on social media and social media analytics. It is an essential tool for every social media user, i.e. a company or a business owner to maximize its online effectiveness. Social media analytics provide a new platform for assessing interactive marketing by analyzing, integrating and enabling enterprises to respond to the social intelligence that is gathered by broadening their reach, bringing down retention and generating more revenues. It also allows you to arrive at important business decisions in terms of marketing and branding.

Service providers of social media analytics tools offers fast results to retain a record of social media behaviors in real time and gathers mass feedback on what will make a certain service/ product work and what will not. Other benefits include the following:

·         Provides trending views and drill-down capabilities
·         Provides insights that helps to make faster, smarter operating decisions across huge amounts of social data
·         Revenue acquisition
·         Offers faster insights into the key influences on your K-Factor and viral campaigns
·         Understand what keeps customers engaged, and uncover the levers that can most influence revenues.

With the emergence and expansion of social media platforms today, such as blogs, Twitter and Facebook marketers needs to evaluate in a unique pattern about the next social analytics like facebook analytics requirements in a web 2.0 landscape.

Increase Effectiveness on Social Media with Facebook Metrics

Wikipedia defines social media as “interactive platforms via which individuals and communities create and share user-generated content.” The core concept of social media is socializing and establishing communication and hence it started as a means to stay in touch with one’s current and estranged friends and family members. However, its ability to reach wider audiences got the enterprises thinking about leveraging social media to augment business profits.

The factors that contribute to social media’s popularity are its accessibility, reach, immediacy, permanence, and usability. That makes it the most popular media when compared to other forms of media. According to Jody Nimetz, author of Marketing Jive, there are five major uses for businesses and social media: to create brand awareness, as an online reputation management tool, for recruiting, to learn about new technologies and competitors, and as a lead generation tool to intercept potential prospects.

As per Nielsen’s recent study ‘The State of the Media: The Social Media Report (Q3 2011)’, social networks is a top online destination– accounting for a total of 23% of time spent online. This points to the fact that a great percentage of the people are spending time on social networks rather than on business pages. Hence, to set profits rolling enterprises must engage customers in conversations where they are found rather than expecting them to come to them.

Of the different social networking sites, Facebook is the most popular one. Statistics show that Americans spend 53.5 billion minutes on Facebook. Hence, all businesses need to focus on Facebook. Facebook and purpose-built social analytics help measure and increase effectiveness online. Facebook provides an entirely new paradigm for measuring interactive marketing, expanding reach, increasing retention, and ultimately, driving more revenue. The following are some of the features of the best of breed social media analytics tools.

·         It provides fast results for businesses to track web data, get real-time distribution and engagement Facebook metrics and get immediate feedback on how content is performing, so that enterprises can optimize products, features, campaigns, content and interactions faster.
·         With an easy-to-use visualization interface that provides both trending views and drill-down capabilities, it gives valuable insights to make faster, smarter operating decisions, even across huge amounts of social data.
·         It helps to gain faster insights into the key influences on K-Factor and virality campaigns, understand what keeps customers engaged, and uncover the levers that can most affect revenues.

Thus, with Facebook analytics, enterprises can increase their effectiveness on social media.