All of us are on these social networking sites, right? In fact, in today’s world, a person who is not on these social networking sites is not alive! People visit these sites for many reasons. Some come because their friends have joined these sites, some come because they feel the need to join, and some join because they want to increase contacts.
But late, a new trend has started. You can also find companies on these sites. Well, what could be the reason? The answer to such a simple question is a bit complicated. They come there to promote the brand, well this is pretty obvious and it’s implied. But how many people know that it is also becoming a source of new product development and market research! Social networking sites have slowly evolved from branding and promotion tools to tools based on market research. Facebook is a famous social networking site that recently added this new tool that allows you to ask questions through surveys. Now these are very clear market research tools that can be used for new product development and understanding what your customers want.
People are talking about things all the time. Be it blogs, social networking sites and a host of other places. Yes, I agree, there are many blogs and websites where people are paid to write, but there are also genuine people. The future of market research lies in the development of web market research tools. Whether it’s positive things or negative things, people are thinking, tweeting, posting every second.
Tools are being developed in these spheres that are able to identify these “key words” and then look at the complete sentence and interpret the sentences to give an idea of the feelings the speaker or tweeter has about it. A major branch of computer science, natural language processing, has been devoted to understanding the interactions between computers and human languages. Although natural language processing is currently more concentrated in the fields of robotics and related topics, it is slowly being used in the application of data mining and business intelligence tool development. Numerous web analytics tools are available today on the Internet.
There are some that give real-time information along with demographic targeting to some degree, with around 80% accuracy. There are some companies that have started using social networking sites as a tool to have an e-commerce website where things can be bought and sold through these sites.
The time has come, now social networking sites are not mere tools for socializing with friends and colleagues, they have become gigantic tools for businesses to try and SOCIALIZE with their potential and current customers and earn lots of money from it!