Review: Simplify360.com - Innovating Your Social Media Campaign

The social media product segment is changing day by day and so is its market size. A recent post in Information Week reported that the demand for Text-Analytics has risen to $1 Billion. This is a huge demand which depicts that the market is eager to understand the social conversation and social sentiments. But there are very few start-ups or companies investing their time in the core technology to mine the social data and bring insights to the market. Without a doubt there are many products out there in the market, providing social insights for businesses.

Besides the text-analytics there are other interesting elements in the social media product like:

1. brand monitoring (finding the trend in the volume of mentions in the social networking sites),
2. competitive comparison (basically comparing different metrics between brands' social presence),
3. channel analytics (finding the influence and the effectiveness of brand’s social profiles like Twitter accounts and Facebook fan pages),
4. message publishing (allowing users to compose and schedule message in different social networking channels)

Brands like Hootsuite and Co-Tweet were originally a social content publishing company but they are soon entering into the area of monitoring and reporting. There are many big competitors like Radian6, Sysomos which are hardcore social analytics products. On the other hand there are products like iEngage from Infosys which are trying to offer a single platform solution for businesses.

Simplify360 is an emerging social media tool in the market with a unique value proposition. Simplify360 is similar to radian6 in terms or monitoring and social analytics, but Simplify360 also has a publishing system which will help users manage their social updates. In a way, Simplify360 is a one stop solution for managing your social media.

The above figure shows the basic layout of elements in social analytics application. Users can choose their source, view the overall trend in the mention and also see the distribution in the sentiment.

The figure below shows the demographics and location statistics of brand mentions.

In addition to brand mentions, you can also view the channel analytics of your twitter profile and Facebook page.

The above screenshots clearly show the offerings from social media analytical software. But these are only the tips of the ice-bergs. With advances in text analytics and social data mining, these applications promise much more than just numbers but real insights into the social conversation that will help researchers and marketers to make their decision.

Perhaps, this is the first time there is actually a tool which market researchers can use to understand the market rather than just taking surveys, which are time consuming and limited.

The future of social media products is bright and they have lot of potential to add value to the market. Some of the key area of possible emergence include:

1. Extensive market sentiment research.
2. Researching sentiment of society for certain cause and programme.
3. Managing and monitoring social activism.
4. Brand Reputation Management for Celebrities and top notch brands.
5. Extensive online customer services.
6. Job hiring process and evaluating the candidates

Social media analytics tools are soon going to be omnipresent and be as relevant as the calculator. It may take time, but with all the innovation that is happening in the field it may be inevitable.

*Image courtesy: Simplify360.com

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