With a target audience that consists primarily of millennials, the company has relied heavily on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest to help it grow its annual sales to $2.5 million in approximately two years, according to a recent article from ZDnet.
In doing so, the company relied on Google Analytics to help crunch its data to provide insight into creating content with mobile devices and a target market of young individuals in mind. The success is just one of many stories that illustrate the power of social media.
Yet, against the backdrop of an increasing number of success stories is growing demand to make social media data easier to analyze. As those demands grow, more firms are launching services for analyzing social media data, which is only making matters more complex as marketing executives try to sort through a long list of competing products.
Mergers and acquisitions, nonetheless, are likely to eventually streamline a complicated marketplace. The diversity of social media analytics providers is highlighted, in part, by a recent KEYHOLE article that ranks what it believes are the top 25 technology vendors.
The article advises marketers to first assess their business objectives and then set performance goals prior to searching for analytics technology. It then lists the diverse features offered by each of the 25 companies.
Some products are capable of reaching across multiple social media platforms while certain products are better for crunching demographic data or tracking if users are posting negative or positive feedback online. Other products such as Crowdbooster analyze data to recommend the best time to post content. Pricing ranges from free for a handful of products to Google Analytics, which tops the chart with a $150,000 monthly fee.
When considering the complex nature of social media marketing and the large number of firms that provide analytics technology, it is likely that a wave of mergers and acquisitions will eventually streamline the industry. This could result in a smaller number of firms. The firms remaining, however, will probably offer a variety of analytic products that will be streamlined to simplify reporting.
Some acquisitions are already taking place. Hootsuite, which is a Vancouver, British Columbia-based social media management provider, recently acquired LiftMetrix, a social analytics vendor, according to an article from CMSwire.
LiftMetrix will be an add-on to Hootsuite’s existing social media services, including a dashboard and social listening platform called Insights. That platform was acquired by Hootsuite when the company purchased uberVu two years ago.
Like with any industry, firms that survive industry consolidation will likely be the best suited to respond to clients’ quickly changing needs while offering technology that provides answers in an easy-to-understand, plain-language format.
