Marketing potential of social media
Jinfo Blog

31st May 2009

By Udo Hohlfeld

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Unlike search engine optimisation and search engine marketing, there is still no clear or easy way for marketers to measure to the business potential or impact of social media. A service might become hype (e.g. Facebook, Twitter et al) but soon discussion starts on how to exploit the hype and turn it into money. Advertising, and in particular user specific advertising, seems to be the most promising. The sheer mass of active users attracts marketers to exploit the business potential of social networks by connecting with consumers in personalized and meaningful ways. Marketers need actionable insights to develop successful, facts-based social media marketing strategies. Another requirement would be to leverage the insights for marketing campaigns across various online channels. As part of its online marketing suite, Omniture offers such a tool for measuring the success of Facebook applications. Named App Measurement for Facebook, it builds on the site's reporting capabilities provided by Facebook's online analytics solution SiteCatalyst. The tool enables marketers to categorize users by how many members they have, see which parts of the app are most popular, monitor video sharing and observe which users invited their friends to the app. Screenshots of the tool can be accessed at http://digbig.com/4ytpx and additional information at http://www.omniture.com. Definitely, there will be many more such tools to measure online user activities and behaviour in the short-term, as it seems to be a huge market. But the concern deeply related to this data grabbing is and will be protection of user privacy. Hopefully, there will be satisfactory solutions for privacy protection as well.

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