Facebook, Twitter, orkut – are they mere social networking sites?

We are all on these social media sites, aren’t we? In fact, in today’s world, a person who is not on these social media sites is not alive at all. People come to these sites for many reasons. Some come because their friends have joined these sites, some come because they feel the need to join, and others join because they want to increase contacts.

But until late, a new trend has started. Companies can also be found on these sites. Well what could be the reason? The answer to such a simple question is a bit complicated. They come there for the promotion of the brand, well this is pretty obvious and it is implied. But how many people know that it is also becoming a source of new product development and market research! Social media sites have slowly evolved from branding and promotion tools to market research-based tools. Facebook is a famous social networking site that recently added this new tool that allows you to ask questions through surveys. Now these are very clear market research tools that you can use to develop new products and understand what your customers want.

People talk about things all the time. Be it blogs, social networking sites, and various other places. Yes, I agree, there are many blogs and websites where people get paid to write, but there are also genuine people. The future of market research lies in the development of web market research tools. Either positive or negative things, people think, tweet, post every second.

Tools are being developed in these areas that are able to identify these “keywords” and then look at the whole sentence and interpret the sentences to give an idea of ​​the feelings that the speaker or says the tweeter has about it. An important branch of computer science, natural language processing, has been dedicated to understanding the interactions between computers and human languages. Although natural language processing is currently more concentrated in the fields of robotics and related subjects, it is slowly being used in the application of the development of business intelligence and data mining tools. Today, there are numerous web analytics tools available on the Internet.

There are some that provide real-time information along with demographic targeting to some extent, with an accuracy of around 80%. There are some companies that have started to use social networking sites as a tool to have an e-commerce website where you can buy and sell things through these sites.

The time has come, now social media sites are not mere tools for socializing with friends and colleagues, they have become gigantic tools for companies to try to SOCIALIZE with their current and potential customers and make a lot of money from it!