Business Intelligence is rapidly evolving. There’s so much data, especially on social networks, that there’s almost too much (almost). Figuring out how to use, analyze and leverage all the data better and faster than competitors is going to be key. Knowing how to use business intelligence as a competitive tool is obvious. Understanding how competitors are using it, and how their methods are evolving will help a business stay ahead of the curve. Tableau Software has a great presentation on the Top Trends in Business Intelligence for 2014.
Marketing
Twitter’s Promoted Tweets Going Mobile
It was just a matter of time before Twitter increased the amount of ads in its feed and applications. Twitter announced on Monday that mobile users would start to see promoted tweets right in their timelines. Promoted Tweets are a way for advertisers to get themselves in front of more Twitter users, and a way for Twitter to make money. This change is not surprising now that Twitter has public stockholders to please. It’s common knowledge that ads that are set apart tend to be ignored, so putting Promoted Tweets right in the feed is a way to increase the performance of those ads.
Using Hastags on Facebook May Kill Your Content
On Twitter, hashtags help spread news and link conversations. On Google+, hashtags help group together related content. On Facebook, hashtags kill your content? According to a study by EdgeRank, when hashtags are used by businesses on status messages, both engagement and virality drop significantly. While this may be related to the posts that are being tagged, it seems to me that this is really a problem with Facebook’s hashtag system. Unlike Google+ and Twitter, hashtags are not easy to use or browse on Facebook — they also seem disruptive in the news feed — like you’ve just posted a Twitter post without bothering to modify it for Facebook.
Social Times has more analysis:
EdgeRank analyzed 35,000 posts from 500 business pages over the month of July this year. They were shocked by the results. At best, the hashtags had no impact, and at worst, the presence of a hashtag reduced the reach of the posts. Contrast this with Twitter, one of the first sites to use hashtags effectively, 70 percent of brands saw retweets increase with the use of hashtags. — Facebook Hashtags Aren’t Very Effective, Study Says by Kimberlee Morrison