Social Media Monitoring by Companies is on the rise

With internet penetration level of 30% of Global population, there are more than 2 billion internet users in the world and numbers are growing at a significant pace according to data provided by We are Social January 2012 edition. North America followed by Europe has higher levels of internet penetration. With social network penetration level of 22% of Global population, there are 1.5 billion social network/media users worldwide and North America followed by Europe has higher penetration levels. There has been a significant rise in the number of social media users in the last few years and social media users are actively engaging in various social networks in terms of interacting with friends, playing games, sharing information and one of the most critical activity that they are doing on the social networks is voicing their opinions about the various products and services, customer service feedbacks, Branding and reputation of businesses, complaining and actively participating in social media marketing campaigns by businesses. Businesses across the globe have realized the need to monitor various social networks to know what customers are talking about their businesses and their offerings, whether the feedback is positive or negative, how is it impacting the business and how to tackle negative feedback and comments as they have significant effect on the company and its reputation.

A recent study of global companies by SHARE and GUIDE SHARE EUROPE and sponsored by IBM and Marist College found that only 52.8% of respondents are monitoring open social media networks and only 30% are monitoring their proprietary social networks. However close to 60% of respondents have plans to increase the social media monitoring and will increase social media monitoring and invest in Business Intelligence tools in the next two years which highlights the fact that social media monitoring is an essential part of the strategy for understanding the consumer behavior and needs. Businesses are utilizing social media monitoring according to the survey respondents for tracking metrics related to customer satisfaction (26.8%), Overall Buzz (23.7%), Brand Experience (21%) and Advertising campaign performance (18.1%). Survey respondents also highlighted the fact that more than 25% of them are using social media data in their overall business strategy and close to 29% of them are planning to use the data collected on the various social media networkers further more in their overall strategy formulation. Most of the survey respondents are IT professionals and other management professionals and most of the companies are based out of North America and from Financial Services industry.

Social media networks generate huge data and require specific monitoring and business intelligence tools to analyze the data which includes insights on the consumer behavior, brand reputation, customer experience and advertising campaign performance. Vendors like IBM, SAS, and Google etc provide the social media business intelligence tools that help in analyzing the data. Presently sales & marketing, Public Relations and Customer Service departments with in the organizations are actively utilizing the social media monitoring, and analysis of such data in their operations but the rest of the departments have yet to start utilizing this critical data. There is a realization among the businesses about the criticality of the social media monitoring and are planning to invest resources in the monitoring and analytical tools. There are specific teams working within the organization who monitor various social networks and some businesses outsourced it.