The Leading Sources Of Social Media Intelligence Are Linkedin And TwitterA big customer base does not necessarily mean better for all. That is proved by Facebook that may have a hundred million more users than LinkedIn or Twitter but the executives who are involved in decision making activities in market intelligence prefer the intelligence reports that are generated from Twitter and LinkedIn rather than Facebook. That has been published in the report of the Digimind State of Market Intelligence 2012.
Even though the social media sites are gathering importance as sources of intelligence, 21% of the respondents say that social media monitoring is not used to complement their intelligence operations though about 60% of the respondents are using the intelligence projects in different ways. There is a small number of businesses that do not believe in the value in monitoring the social media sites and view it beneficial only for those who work in the B2C sphere. There are many businesses across different industries that are using the monitoring of such channels as tools for gathering intelligence information. There are market intelligence departments that have fared well surprisingly even with the economic downturn. Many of the respondents said that the companies did not downsize their intelligence teams as they produced results in the difficult economy. The teams are however operating with a tight staff and they are protecting the workforce of other companies as well. The recession economy has affected the recruitment plan and many of the respondents have frozen their hiring in 2012. About 28% of the respondents admitted that companies have cut budgets in the last two years. The Digimind survey covered budgets in corporate intelligence departments of different organizations. The hiring plans were also discussed. The different industries were considered in this survey. |
Out of ten respondents eight have said that social media channels were used to gather information about the competitors, trends in the market and developments in the industry along with consumer behavior and other related information. According to such a survey, the favorite sites that companies stated since day to day intelligence activities were LinkedIn with around 70% companies gaining benefits from it while Twitter came in second with a participation rate of 62.5%. Facebook comes in third at 47.2%. Google ranks forth and offers a participation rate of 35.2% among such companies.