What do people think of our product? How successful was our last marketing campaign? Not that long ago if businesses wanted to know the answer to these questions they would have to hire market research firms that would poll select customers about their thoughts. With the widespread use of social media and improved natural language processing and machine learning algorithms, social media analytics tools can provide a more comprehensive picture of how consumers feel about companies and their products.

Social media analytics software is used to gather data from various social media sites in order to guide a business’ marketing strategy. Each social media platform offers its own analytics interface, but for companies whose presence on social media is multi-faceted, a more robust software option is necessary, one in which data is tracked on several platforms at once, and in some cases, in real time. Sophisticated software with natural language processing will attempt to understand meaning and context in text and human speech. The analyzed data can then be used to target marketing campaigns, improve customer service, or improve existing products, among others.

Today’s market size shows the amount businesses around the world spent in 2016 and are projected to spend in 2022 on social media analytics tools. According to the source, cloud-based social media analytics tools are expected to experience the highest growth during this time period due to their cost-effectiveness, scalability and flexibility in allowing businesses to oversee their campaign management and performance monitoring. Currently, there are more than 25 key companies worldwide that create social media analytics tools.

Geographic reference: World
Year: 2016 and 2022 projected
Market size: $2.1 billion and $9.5 billion respectively
Sources: “Social Media Analytics Market: Global Market Size to Reach $9463.54 Million by 2022,” Nasdaq GlobeNewswire Press Release, December 22, 2017 available online here; Margaret Rouse and Ed Burns, “Social Media Analytics,” TechTarget, June 2017 available online here; Margaret Rouse and Craig Stedman, “Unstructured Data,” TechTarget, January 2018 available online here.
Image source: Maialisa, “marketing-social-media-advertising-1573711,” Pixabay, August 8, 2016 available online here.