Social media has come a long way into become an integral part in the digital marketing industry. The fact that it has become an irreplaceable part of most people’s daily activity has served the marketing industry well by indirectly benefiting from consumers’ behavior.

Now we have entered the third generation of social media analytics, and the potential that it brings has never been more exciting! Initially, companies would only play with the surface of social media users’ data, e.g. using number of fans, followers, likes to distinguish online market share. Yet, the industry has evolved so much that we are now able to look in depth as far as the reasoning for each consumers’ reaction towards marketing promotions they are exposed to. For this, we have Social analytics to thank for. Using these tools, we can now analyze and improve social media campaigns in real-time! for example, Netbase can identify promotional campaigns that are underperforming and suggest you ways to improve your promotional content to help make it more relevant to your target market. Social media analytics also allows us to discover new ways to position your product based on understanding how and why customers buy and use them through social media post analysis. Moreover, we can also take advantage of this to increase market share by offering customers what they did not find from competitors’ offering based on social media data.

With such promise it brings to the table, I can’t wait for what social media has to offer next.

Source: http://www.adweek.com/brandshare/next-gen-social-analytics-are-transforming-digital-marketing-160064