Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Social Media Market Overview

As per Forrester’s report on “US Interactive Marketing Forecast 2009 to 2014” the spend on Social Media Marketing to grow at an annual rate of 34 percent – faster than any other form of online marketing and double the average growth rate of 17 percent for all online mediums. Forrester estimates that online advertising will grow from 12 percent of total marketing spend this year to 21 percent by 2014.

Number of people on social media platforms is increasing by the minute, if we have a look at the most popular social media platform i.e. Facebook®, it had 350 million users in January 2010 out of which 102 million were from USA and only 5.6 million users were from India where as if you compare the population of these two countries the trend is exactly opposite i.e. In 2010 India’s population has reached 1.18 billion and that of China has reached 1.34 billion where that of USA is 0.31 billion people.

Giants like IBM, SAS, Google and Accenture have jumped into the game with both feet and offer solution offerings ranging from SPSS Modeler data mining and text analytics workbench, Social Media Analytics to Social CRM. There are huge numbers of smaller player which offer more customized solution and number of such players is increasing exponentially.

3 comments:

Amitesh Srivastava said...

Even Cognizant has great presence and solutions when it comes to teh digital space in general and SCRM in perticular. Read this blog by Paul Greenberg where he has identified Cognizant as one of the leaders in this space. IMB does not even feature there.http://ht.ly/19Zt3v

Shameer said...

Great post Madhur!

It's interesting to see the spurge of activity on the digital media space by players both home grown and international. But what's alarming and going unnoticed is how the industry is tarnished by many players in this market who claim to be Social Media experts and provide solutions which are incompetent.

The industry and clients today are clouded by these solutions floating in the market which do not have what it takes to frame a proper social media strategy. SCRM and other ORM solutions are definitely the way to go but it is only as effective as the coverage on social media that it has access to.

What brand's fail to realize is that the game play on social media is very different from traditional PR and it requires a new level of understanding. Return on Investment may not be computable, but there are other benchmarks and parameters that one need to dwell into.

Ishtiba said...

There is so many aspects to consider when we are talk about social media and also companies in their excitement to adopt it, sometimes forget their main objectives and they just go for social media as its trendy and because of the buzz around it.

What they should understand is that all this needs careful strategy that is in line with the business objectives for a certain period. Whats also happening is that many companies are going for the social media tools, and god knows hw many companies come up with some stupid tool and naming it a social media tool.

N they ask too quickly whats the return on investment instead of talking about metrics and how this will be of help in some years.