Social media data is one of the easiest and cheaper mode of understanding the personality and preferences of an individual, which makes online data collection a major trend in the marketing industry.
What you don’t know here is that apart from advertising their brands and offers through social media websites, these companies also keep a track of things you post on your social networking site.

It is fun to post things on your friend’s forum or to create your own blog, but with all these posts and writings being public, you must not overlook the fact that everything you write online is scrutinized and used by companies looking forward to get in touch with you for various reasons.

Experts have all kinds of theories regarding data mining, some believe that using casual chats and posts of users by their banks or other companies can provoke a backlash, other insists that it is nothing but harmless way of making things easy and customized for both the prospective users and the interested companies. Its like when a user leaves a recommendation posts on an online bookstore about a particular book, the online bookstores find out that a particular user likes to buy particular set of books through online bookstores.

How data collection is done?

It is amazing to see how a data collecting company can create a dossier about a person without even meeting him/her in person. A data collecting company basically collects information including the financial picture and purchase preferences or more.
If you are wondering how online data collecting works and why does it sound scary? Then, you must realize that a data mining company does nothing to affect you, or any other user, personally or professionally. Using basic online post, casual forum chats and blog based information, these companies create a behavioral pattern of an individual to form an information chart of possible preferences and status of each individual. This collection of online information and behavioral pattern is based on publicly posted data and thus, it does not impact a person in any negative way.

Usually when a person hears about online data collecting his first reaction is worry about his credit reports and information, which is where online data collating faces opposition by users. But, not many people know that social media data collecting is purely based on the information posted on blogs, social media websites like Twitter, Facebook, newsgroups and forums, which also mean that these data collecting companies do not hold any access to an individual’s credit reports.

You must also take a note of the fact that social media data collecting is nothing but a marketing tool used by financial organizations like lenders and banks and other non-profit companies to help their marketing goals and lending decisions. It’s like when you write a post about a particular credit card that you want to know about or have heard about or dislike, that particular data is used by a data company to give their banker clients your perception and preferences about that product.

Any company that mines social data has access to only the information that you have made public on internet, as these companies work like search engine crawlers, thus everything you publish online is crawled instantly. Often, data collecting companies work for clients looking forward to ability to personalize and customize their offers services to better use.

While it acts a benefit for companies looking forward to target prospective customers, it can also help you with your credits. When you are looking for a loan or some kind of financial assistance, saying or writing the right things online are very important. Staying in the friend’s list of people with good credit histories makes you a person with good or trusted company. This is what some expert’s call as “like follows like” concept.

How a user can benefit from data collection?

According to experts following social media data collecting, internet users must always be cautious about what they write on their networking sites and blogs.
Things to avoid posting on your profile or blog largely depend upon whether you have a public or private social networking profile. Because if your Facebook and Twitter profiles are public and open to all, you must not write anything, not even as a joke, about your bad banking habits or credit status. Funny or joking remarks about you going bankrupt can be taken in account by data collecting companies working for banks and other financial organization, which is why you must completely avoid indulging into any such jokes online, because you don’t want to end up explaining your bank why they shouldn’t hold up your loan application.

Second most important thing to remember when living in a world of social network, profiles, tweets and blogs is to make friends with caution. As mentioned above, with a good friend list of people with good credit risk you get the opportunity to have a good credit risk too, thus it is always a good idea to be friends with the right kind of people online. Try not to add any person who you believe can paint a bad picture of you, for companies keeping a check on your social profiles on web.

Also, never ever add in people you don’t know much about. Getting number of friends request does sound good on web, but it is risky if you do not know who these people are and what kind of credit or financial status they hold. Either you avoid accepting random requests or else make sure you go through their profiles, before you decide to click on the accept button.

Data collecting companies use web tools that work both ways for you and their clients, who want to market their offer and products to you. But, the adverse effect of this open data collection is based upon how you project yourself on your social media sites. Remember the more honest, positive and less personal you are, the better it is.

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Google’s announcement of stitching Google search results with social networks is now a successful feature, launched as an opt-in experiment in Google Labs. 

Google comes up with Social Search - SERPS

Social Search has literally made online search a lot more easy and personal, which means now when you are searching for a particular piece of information blogged about, by a friend of yours, you get it on the first page.
What really makes Social Search amazing is the fact that it easily finds any piece of web content from your social connections on internet, whether you are looking for a Blog or tweet or friend’s profile update. In simple words, you can call this feature as a search filter that finds you result from your social circle on Blogs, FriendFeed, Twitter or any other social networking sites linked to your Google account. 

 Google search works just the way it has been doing for years now, which means you can still go on searching for information without using the new ‘Social Search’ feature. Social Search is nothing but an attempt of making search results more relevant and flexible, as not only does it provides all your social circle based web information on one place… but also prioritizes results from your friend circle.

Google Social Search Results

 Despite social networking bazaar of Twitter, blogs and Facebook being a huge platform for social media marketing, it is not hard to find those who are skeptical and ignorant of its ability to advertise to a bigger circle of prospective customers.
The good news is that social circle search not only, remarkably, answers all such uncertainties, but also displays a good example of how social search results can change SEO.

Since the Social Search displays results from a particular circle of friends (Google users) linked to social networking sites, if you are a business firm seeking good SEO or online marketing through web of networking sites, having online networking profiles or blogs can do a lot. So now when a follower on your Twitter profiles searches through Google’s’ Social Search, the result will also feature content or pictures or blogs posted by you… because, you are part of the user’s social circle.
Isn’t that speedy marketing and unique form of SEO? Truth is… ‘Social Circle Search’ boosts and defines the social media marketing feature of many networking sites.

How it works? Simple, you add links to your social networking sites on your Google account, stay online and in no time this new feature will present you with relevant resources, collected from your circle of known people on web.

Google Social Search SERPS for a Search with Google Bus

How it helps? Well, imagine you need a good comparison of iPhone and a new Blackberry mobile set. So, instead of tweeting your friends or calling them up to ask if anyone knows which phone is better, you simply search online… and Google’s Social Search will, scan each and every publicly posted content from your friends online to, give a search results from people you know… in short, if your friend has blogged or tweeted about the information you seek, Google will bring it to you (its always better to get information from trusted source than an unknown blogger) along with other results too.

Google’s Social Search is based on the perception that a user would always give importance to search results, from a known and trusted group of people.
It seems Google is trying to transform the verbal social search into techno form of online social search…!

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Airtel-Twitter deal launches off in India

Tweeting from phone might prove as truly the right strategy for Twitter, if the aim is to spread across the world, especially India. Not that the deal will change minds of every Airtel-Bharti user who is against anything to do with Tweets or social networking sites, but it will welcome aboard those Airtel users who practically live on the texting service, called SMS.
Mobile phones are more successful in reaching the people in small towns and cities, as compared to web and internet service. With Twitter becoming a part of mobile texting, every Indian who holds no access to internet but has an Airtel mobile connection, can enjoy tweeting anytime.

This major deal has send many Tweetarians jumping on their couches, as now a huge number of tweeters can be stay active even with no internet access. A simple SMS like Tweet can be send at usual text messaging charges and can be received for free, which means Twitter gets to expand even in absence of hardwire internet service.

Twitter has been fostering a culture of exchanging important information for free to spread awareness, urgent and relevant news, help during certain shortage or emergencies and global responsiveness towards issues needing attention, but limited access of internet around the world makes it less beneficial platform against the technology called Mobile Texting.
The best thing about mobile phones is that even the lowest of model has a text service, which makes it a perfect tool for Tweeting.

Freedom to enjoy ‘Open Exchange of Information’ is what the deal is all about, that’s how Twitter explains it. It might be too early to calculate the benefit stats of the agreement, but Bharti-Airtel users active in Twitter are truly in for a bonanza.
One has to admit that, the success of Twitter on phone experiment depends upon the increase in the ratio of Bharti-Airtel users entering Twitterland.

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Social Media Monetization is an important set of words for business sector, trying to analyze social media sites like Twitter. And for monetization of these social networking websites, media measurement tools are employed. These tools are basically tweet analyzing software that assists a company with various kind of analysis including sentiment and behavioral analysis. Monitoring tweeting habits and tweet content helps in keeping a tab on tweeps posing as a benefit for business prospective.

Corporate sectors planning to make use of social media marketing for online popularity cannot overrule the importance of twitter monetization today. Twitter tools assess and measure tweet fluctuations, make a data of hash-tag frequency, quantify regular twitter activities like profile and status update, and chart count of followers and more. Social media through twitter is undoubtedly a major marketing tool, considering the heavy competition among brands trying to attract netizens today.

We bring to you 5 extraordinarily useful twitter tools that will support your aim of social media measurement by analyzing tweets and the brains behind them. Divided into categories like sentiment analysis, behavioral and opinion analysis, these tweet software basically work by breaking down the tweet data and content to assess them and present them statistically.
We’ll show you how to make apt use of these tools to explore the inside out of Tweets and get the maximum benefit by analyzing them to your business’s favor.

Sentiment analysis

Purpose of using social media websites, by corporate industry, is to track the popularity and image of the company or its product in the online circle of prospective clientele. But, tweeting alone will not help in keeping a check on things being said or the sentiments of tweetizens.
Sentiment analysis is designed to provide you with statistical data of negative and positive sentiments about your brand, services and products being launched. Two remarkable Twitter sentiment analysis tools are Twendz and Viral Heat.

Twendz

Twendz is a fabulous tweet analyzing tool that works by focusing on tracking sentiment based analysis. This tool gives you the real insight picture of your brand’s image or product’s ranking by breaking down a collection of relevant tweets and scrutinizes them through categories like negative, neutral and positive, each one represented by a color like red, white and green respectively.

 
Viral Heat

Viral Heat is also a great sentiment analysis tool that supports your social media measurement, by dividing tweets into categories like positive, negative and neutral along with percentages. But, apart from giving you the analysis based on good and bad tweets, Viral Heat does lot more.
This tweet analyzing tool goes deeper into the tweet dissection and offers information like active tweeters, percentage of tweets including URLs, websites and videos being shared among tweetizens, and more.
Viral Heat is quite useful for corporate industries looking forward to keep a check on the performance of their marketing campaign on internet.

Opinion analysis

Opinion analysis is done by comparing a selection of tweets against more number of tweets on the same topic. This kind of analysis helps in understanding nature of tweets as well as how they stand against other tweets. Opinion analysis is the easiest way to understand general consensus to support a media campaign for business purpose. One such amazing twitter opinion analysis tools is crimson hexagon.

Crimson hexagon (VoxTrot Opinion Monitor)

One of the most powerful social media monetization tool, Crimson Hexagon consist of a superb opinion tracking system called VoxTrot Opinion Monitor. Using its powerful opinion tracking system, crimson hexagon supports the tweet analysis by tracking tweets based on predefined subject. It tracks tweets, divides them in categories according to the tweet content and finally develops a statistical data based on breaking down of the content.
For example, this tool breakdowns content of subject defined tweets and offer opinion characteristics, for example, ‘Who Cares’,’ Nice Service’, ‘Bad Company’ and more.

Twitter Behavioral Analysis

When all you want is to track the tweeting pattern and tweet behavior of tweetizens who could affect your business campaign, you need a remarkable twitter behavioral analysis tools like TweetPsych and Twitoaster.

TweetPsych

Social media monitoring tool of behavioral analysis, like TweetPsych (built by Dan Zarrella), work mostly by analyzing and monitoring linguistic characteristics of group of related tweets. TweetPsych measures number of tweets and create a psychological profile to explain the tweeting pattern, which helps a social media campaign in judging the kind of response to expect from tweetizens.

Twitoaster

Twitoaster works the same way by analyzing the tweeting activities and creating a statistic based data that makes it easy to understand the tweeting behavior. Twitoaster analyzes the tweet activity by threading tighter various tweet conversations on web. This surely helps a social media campaign by giving the tweeting style, conversation characteristics, as well as tweet and replies count per hour, week and day.

 
Twitter analysis tools or software are basically social media monetization or measurement tools that support a business concept by measuring tweets on opinion or behavioral pattern, to help a company in strategizing its Twitter marketing campaign.
Because in the Social Media Marketing world, the more you know about the people you wish to deal with and how they react to your marketing approach, brand awareness or blog posts, the better it would be for your business online.

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What started as a revolutionary concept of creating social networking online has now become a super marketing tool, for modern business sector. And Twitter and Facebook are an active part of the resulting excessive competition and race to make online social networking the next best thing, but even the creators of these modern programming based websites had not much clue back then, of their actual potential to attract business industry.

In order to get the idea of their marketing and selling potential and ability, it is important that one should know what these social networking sites do and why thousands and thousands of people all around the world are going crazy over them.

Facebook

With the purpose of a social networking site being a connective bridge between people from different parts of world, Facebook has surely made an impact among netizens who are enjoying the birth of internet, emails, chat messengers, and video sharing sites like YouTube.
Facebook today has become a planet in its own, with people from almost every country residing and enjoying themselves in it. Mostly, this online platform is used by many to stay connected to their friends and family members across the globe. People with lots of time and craze towards making online friends, emailing, personal chats, sharing pictures and more are also the ones who survive on Facebook and its existence.

Facebook and Marketing

Since Facebook means hundred and thousands of people connected to each other, from different groups and communities, the scope of marketing through a Facebook profile is quite an advantage for companies looking forward to spread awareness on their services and products, through their blog posts and, most importantly, their presence on web.
Facebook is more about having a personal platform to stay connected with online customers by communicating with them, sharing links to website or blog posts, uploading pictures, and starting forums.

It is easy marketing, which might not sell something on the spot, but definitely makes you a known Brand and gets you followers! Corporate sector has started using Facebook to get an insight on their market value, their image, feedback from customers. Because of the rapidly increasing and growing user base on Facebook, business companies get a platform to promote and present itself to their prospective customers.
But when marketing through Facebook, one has to keep in mind that it only works when enough time is invested.

Twitter

Although, they both arise from the evolving digital technology, Twitter is not Facebook’s twin. In fact, Twitter is little more complicated, but more effective in many ways.
Twitter is like a fusion of a messenger and a Blog, which has the ability to reach beyond known circle of people. That’s why it’s better known as a Micro Blogging platform today!
Twitter, like Facebook, too has a potential of social networking, but is yet to attract as much people as Facebook.

Since Twitter has less personal element with absence of facilities like video and picture sharing, not many people (with the liking to upload personal pictures, with captions, and collection of videos) enjoy indulging much with this latest avatar of social networking.

Twitter and Marketing

Twitter might not be as popular among netizens as compared to Facebook, but it has surely made a big impression among corporate industry. Tweeting is ‘next big thing’ for many companies, as it allows them a small podium to present themselves to a mass and puts them in spotlight.
Since Tweets are small and go straight to every follower, companies and brand owners get to send one good message to everyone, all at once. It lets them send news, updates and information online with help of a tiny but very valuable tweet.

While some business firms use Tweeting as a mode of getting Feedbacks from customers, others end up using it to research on their consumers and stay in the competition.
Twitter, having the ability to generate online search engine traffic, is also a major tool for websites that need visitors. Promotional tweets often consist of an information message and the link to a website or blog article. In short, Twitter has the right promotional skills required by online marketers and bloggers.

Who is the winner?

Twitter and Facebook are both massive social networking tools that can be used for advertising, marketing, researching and communicating. Each one has its own benefits for marketing seekers, thus branding the best one is not the right question, as the usability and benefit varies depending largely on the companies and their purpose for entering the social networking world.

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