Data, technologies and tools that provide access to data form a core component in today’s mainstream society. One of the upcoming trends that have been lurking around the corner is the adoption of social media as part of mainstream big data business. Or is it the other way around? Has big data become more mainstream by embracing social media as a rich source of business data? Whatever may be the case, the fact remains that more and more, the government and business sectors are depending on the social media buzz the most tweeted keywords or the most prevalent hashtagsto determine the future course of action in politics, in business, and in society.
According to a recent study, global users post 400 million tweets on Twitter, upload 350 million photos on Facebook, and view 4 billion YouTube videos on a daily basis. Not surprisingly, United Kingdom’s Economic and Social Research Council plans on investing £64 million in order to fund research on big data, social media data, and its use in big data analytics. Today’s governments cannot function without the support of political campaigns launched through the social media; and today’s businesses run the risk of losing millions in profit unless they leverage social data (data floating all across the social media platforms) for improving their operational processes or product portfolios. Refer to this graphic from IDG, which accurately reflects the proliferation of big data in mainstream business
Recent events in the social data market
Twitter vs Facebook: A possible war over social data market control
Shifts in business sentiments: The probable trends to watch
Twitter and Apple’s acquisitions signal broad acceptance of social data into the ambit of big data market. Gnip serves customers in more than 40 countries; and Topsy was known for delivering rich, Twitter content to customers. Two acquisitions validate the worth of social data as a revenue earner. The new developments may be:
- Governments, who already rely on social media for election campaigns and political surveys, will now rely more on social feeds like Twitter and Facebook for influencing the outcomes of elections.
- Businesses will have access to more in-depth, more refined twitter feeds for their customer relationship management, product portfolio management, and human resources development programs.
- Twitter + Gnip together will form a strong collaboration in future twitter market, but Gnip may lose access to other social platforms runs the risk of social alienation from broad social media platforms. They will have to improve their data sets to compete with Datasift.
- Datasift will become the sole controller of social data in the US market, but may have reduced licensing to Twitter data. (Twitter generated $70.3 million in revenue last year from licensing its data.)
- Facebook may give increasing competition to Twitter.
- NTT will remain unaffected as it enjoys a monopoly over the Japanese, social data market.
- Development of new privacy regulations related to social media data.
- Development of more advanced analytics technologies to tackle vast streams of semi-structured and unstructured data.