Business Solutions: Social Networking and Location Intelligence | The Communication Blog

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Business Solutions: Social Networking and Location Intelligence

By Adriana Noton


Today, more than 500 million people use Facebook. Other social networking sites such as Twitter are being used by millions of web users from around the world. People use these social networking sites to connect with friends and family as well as to provide a great deal of personal information to users in their networking group. For businesses, social networking sites provide enormous potential for building a brand and attracting sales. The key to leveraging social networks is to use these networks as a powerful research and data collection tool in order to identify and target relevant customers. To achieve their social networking marketing goals, businesses are now taking advantage of location intelligence solutions.

Today, the top social networks according to the number of registered users include: Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, Yahoo, MSN/Windows Live/Bing, Flickr, and LinkedIn. Using location intelligence solutions to gather social networking data for social analysis allows businesses to build large consumer databases based on their own defined parameters. The data gathered can include: consumer demographics, location of the consumer, as well as consumer lifestyle, behavior, personality characteristics, shopping habits, interests...etc. As well, the emergence of mobile devices such as the iphone and ipad allow businesses to harness the power of location awareness.

There are business intelligence software solutions that provide effective social network analysis. They are designed to help businesses identify exactly where to market their products and services. Within a social network, the social relationships are viewed as individuals within the social networks as well as their relationship with other users. The software is used to research social network users and obtain an all-inclusive view of the users' actions, behaviors, and interests, in order to leverage new marketing areas. Social data maps are created to show the common links among individuals, other users in the network, and the groups in the social network. Once social analysis has been completed, a business able is able to create and implement marketing strategies that can include: conversational marketing (i.e. online dialogue such as in a Blog or on Twitter), Influence Marketing (targeting an individual who has influence over potential buyers in the network), Similarity Group Marketing (leverage existing relationships to build brand recognition and customer loyalty), Word of Mouth Marketing (i.e. creating viral videos), and much more. Companies will also have the ability to target influential Blog conversations for the purpose of direct marketing and brand advertising.

Harvesting information from people belonging to various social networks allows a company to create an effective and large consumer database. Social media marketing solutions involve using the data collected to create and implement such marketing solutions as: running targeted banner ads, creating social network online ad campaigns, and providing customers with useful information through various online communication methods. The fundamental objective to achieving success when using social media networks to market or build a brand is delivering advertising and services that are valuable to the users and are not viewed as intrusive.

Using Business Location Intelligence Solutions to harness the marketing power of online social networking is fast becoming a vital component to improving a business's bottom line, building a brand, and attracting and maintaining a loyal customer base.




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