Monitoring Social Networks

Advertising is important. Without proper advertising no one will know about your services or product, and ultimately never purchase it. Now businesses target specific demographics (by age, location, hometowns, education, “scenes”, interests, friends, hobbies) to make the best use of the money they put into advertising. However, this information is not easily utilized (or even gathered) on involuntary potential consumers. Television could at best advertise to the local broadcasting, newspaper ads are becoming useless as the use of newspaper declines heavily, and ads in magazines are only reaching the potential consumers that make the choice to get that particular magazine. But social networking changes the game. Users will VOLUNTARILY enter the basic and even specific information on social networking sites, information, that a business needs to secure customers. Facebook is possibly the most promising social networking site for a business to use. The integration of monitoring technology and the sheer magnitude of users makes this a huge opportunity (which unfortunately for Facebook itself, it can’t seem to monetize. Facebook gets only $5.02 per user per year in revenue.) Companies use Facebook to target users with ads specifically related to them. Users can even “Like” a product or company and see friends who like them as well. The pages for the most part are owned by the company and operated by employees to interact and address those who interact with the page. I would first decide which company to use to monitor Facebook, and perhaps twitter. Sysomos is a top rated company with a 10/10 review, so I’d perhaps go with them. I would use this company to: -Identify my target customers by their age, occupation, education, etc. -Identify key people of influence (those with the most comments/ subscribers/ followers) to use, manipulate, and listen to as many people listen and respect their opinion. -Find out what people are saying about my business. The good we can promote and even reward some people with perhaps free merchandise (shirts, coupons, offers, etc.). The bad we can address ourselves and perhaps even promote and reward in a similar manner. Hiding bad publicity is a part of a business, but too drastically and we will get hate from that. Negative comments picking up popularity we will address and ensure that it will be corrected immediately and in a friendly way. -Find out what events/times of the year/months/days cause what ideas/discussions to be talked about to capitalize from. -Similarly, find out where these discussions are being discussed. -Use “Sentiment Analysis” monitoring to turn these discussions and comments into raw data to learn from. I would try to keep my web site organized and easily reached through Facebook and Twitter. E-Commerce is big with the younger generation that frequents these company pages on Facebook and retweets and listens to the Twitter posts. Taco Bell runs their Facebook page very well. They interact with their customers, listen to their ideas, easily sell merchandise (anecdotes are only worth so much but several people were buying shirts in my town), and I generally can’t recall seeing a negative comment on their page. A lot of this can of course be attributed to the service itself but the web page multiplies the positive comments. I’d like to follow their example for my hypothetical business.