Future of Social Media Monitoring – I

Talks about the future of social media monitoring picked up momentum when Salesforce entered the market. They acquired Radian6, industry’s leading social media monitoring platform. Radian6 is used by 50% of Fortune 100 companies and hence this acquisition is crucial, not only for Salesforce but also for entire social web market.

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When we go little back in times we would see that this market got flooded with hundreds of players of all sizes in a very small time frame.They offered almost similar solutions with different price tags. The purpose was to capture the larger share of the market and lead this new business. Few companies like Radian6, Alterian and Visible Technologies were lucky to catch the early bus. But, as the market got flooded, everybody started asking the very obvious question – where are we heading? And, none of them had the correct answer. The one point agenda to exploit the social media wave seems to have come to an end.

  • Does that mean an end of social media monitoring business?
  • Is there any scope for re-defining this business model?
  • Is there any scope for smaller players?

It’s not so dark as of yet. We do have scope for re-defining this business model and YES, there’s a scope for small players as well. But, to do all this, we’ll have to re-think. We’ll have to re-visit to this business model. Instead of catching the social wave we’ll have to think in terms providing real business value. We’ll have to think in terms of investment and return.

Alright. So the next question would be – How to go about this? What is the way forward for all these companies and also to the concept of social media monitoring?

The way forward is to show results, not in terms of data but in terms of value. There are multiple ways which could provide a proper value, a proper ROI. Getting more marketing insights, social search optimization, social PR and Social CRM are few of them. In next post we’ll talk about one of these concepts and we’ll see how they can help the concept of social media monitoring to flourish further.

7 replies on “Future of Social Media Monitoring – I”

  1. Amanda, Radian6 Community Manager on

    Thanks for the great blog post and for including Radian6!

  2. Amanda,

    I’m really glad that you read it and found it great. Thanks for leaving your comment.

    Cheers!

  3. Amisha on

    The article has raised a critical question…

    Though I am a novice..Still, I think today when use of social media is more of a need,for companies rather than just a luxury…So, in such a situation counting numbers won’t help much… Hence, measurement companies need to align the KPIs with the business objectives and return value …

    It will be really interesting to see the discussion further with reformed business models but I will really appreciate if it includes a real-time application…

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  5. Nitesh this was an eye-opener for all the SMM companies. ROI from media monitoring is the biggest question faced?

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