Business analytics firm SAS has unveiled a new tool that can monitor social media portals, enabling businesses to get a better understanding of what is being said about them on the Internet.
The on-demand SAS Social Media Analytics can monitor sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as well as public discussion forums and blogs. Data can then be integrated with CRM and marketing systems.
As well as external sources the system can also collate and analyse structured and unstructured data from internal systems and maintains an archive for two years. The firm says this will enable the system to understand trends and update historical analyses based on new information.
It can identify and analyse 13 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. It can also cope with slang words.
Once data is collected and analysed it is delivered in real-time through web-based dashboards, reports and workflow-enabled alerts.
“Consumers are online right now talking about your products and services, their experience, and their likes and dislikes. Smart marketers aren’t just listening to online chatter; they are analysing it to better focus resources and build engagement and loyalty,” said Mark Chaves, director of media intelligence solutions at SAS.
“SAS Social Media Analytics helps marketers combine data from online conversations with other data to build a more complete picture of each customer. And then use these analytically driven insights to predict and act,” he added.
