With Facebook recently celebrating its 10th birthday, it would appear social media is here to stay. But whilst smaller businesses and B2B organisations have thus far been reluctant to get fully involved and often have just a token presence (on Facebook and other social networks), this is set to change in 2014, as they are attracted by the chance to engage with their customers more directly.
But to truly maximise the potential of social media, and see a quantifiable return from the time investment, a good social media analytics provider is required. This must be able to identify patterns and trends and turn those into valuable insight. And such analytics requires a powerful infrastructure, able to manage the sheer volume of social media data and scale at times of unexpected social media usage spikes.
So the SME and B2B social media boom presents a huge new-business opportunity for social media analytics specialists who can meet these needs with affordable, fit-for-purpose cloud-based social media analytics solutions and services.
Big data, big opportunity
The volume of big data generated in social media is astonishing. An infographic published by Saxum in January 2014 revealed that in a typical day, users upload 350 million photos on Facebook; post 400 million Tweets and conduct 2.1 billion Twitter searches; and view a total of 200 million hours of video on YouTube. On LinkedIn, 10 million endorsements are made each day and around 1,370 businesses create new pages.
Social media analytics offers organisations unprecedented and highly granular insight into what people think of them at any given time; how, and why that may be changing; and the types of customer or prospect who care and react the most to what the organisation does. Such information is invaluable and can play a major role in shaping future product, engagement and marketing strategies.
Such analytics had until fairly recently only been available to bigger organisations. The good news is that advances in analytics technology and the growing prevalence of cloud-based ‘big data’ analytics solutions and services mean no company is too small to add a social-media monitoring string to its bow.
But such analytics requires a lot of computing power and the right infrastructure to deliver that insight. Optimised, cloud-based social media analytics services provide an ideal vehicle here, allowing vast processing resources to be applied to big-data analytics in a way that is highly scalable, high performance and attractively cost-efficient.
Social media spikes require scalability
Social media analytics is a clever business and the more responsive the service, the better companies are able to maximise the findings. But this demands a reliable, transparent big-data service that is consistently responsive day after day, week after week, even when social media interaction spikes unexpectedly with a viral video or piece of news.
Scalability becomes incredibly important when there is a form of social media crisis and more performance can be required at almost a moment’s notice. To date, bare-metal cloud services are the only way for social media analytics providers to guarantee a responsive and cost effective service in times of crisis, because performance is not impaired by any external factors, such as virtualisation.
Scaling for demand in a bare metal cloud is a predictable and linear process. So, when a Twitter storm happens, analytics providers will be ready to grow and end users will detect no loss in service performance or missing tweets.
Cost control
Affordable scalability will come from the cloud, but not all cloud platforms are equal. Generic, mainstream cloud-based ‘data analytics’ services can offer variable performance, dictated by how much other demand there is on the service at a given time.
For example, if a provider’s infrastructure is unable to scale effectively, a sudden event that causes increased social media chatter could impact on the provider’s ability to deliver accurate and real-time information. This is turn could see their customer miss out on valuable tweets and comments about its products, purely because the provider’s infrastructure was unable to handle the extra processing required.
As the penny finally drops with SMEs and B2B organisations that social media can be the perfect way to communicate with customers and stay informed as to what people are saying about their brand, they are turning to social media in ever-increasing numbers. This in turn means the ability for analytics firms to process more data with less infrastructure investment will be an extremely attractive proposition.
As things stand, only social media analytics based on bare metal cloud technology offers that USP, so it’s important that analytics providers look closely at their infrastructure partners as they package and price new services, ready for the SME social media gold rush.
