Current State of the Internet? Social Media Internet

At the age of the internet, social media have become an essential part of most marketing strategies. This process evolved from the early 2000s, when sites like LinkedIn gained wide popularity, and resulted in an increasing variety of social networks today, many of them allowing for cross-posting. Facebook, started in 2004, is still on top, accounting for 96 per cent of B2C and 88 per cent of B2B companies which are using it. However, other social services are on the rise, like Instagram, established in 2010, with 42 percent of B2C enterprises using the site, or Pinterest, also started in 2010, being used for marketing by 90 percent of specialty businesses in the US, and 84 percent of luxury brands.

In addition to choosing correct platform that fits best the company profile (type of audience; visual, audio, or/and interactive content), there are still significant challenges for marketers, especially for measuring the effectiveness and presenting the value gained from social media campaigns, or demonstrating its ROI. If not done correctly, it can make companies become sceptical of the benefits of using it.

SAP has gone through a number of iterations by trying to fill the market needs in the social media area and to provide for new CRM capabilities. First steps were taken in 2010 when SAP integrated Twitter with its CRM 7.0 system, and delivered a number of reusable APIs.

SAP Social Media Analytics was next big step - solution that was developed in partnership with NetBase, can collect and combine structured data from database – mainly SAP CRM, but also SCM and Finance, with unstructured data (Natural Language Processing techniques), in order to run conversations, and further analyse them. Light version of the product, called SAP Social onDemand is also available (via RDS delivery). SAP HANA Sentiment Intelligence has similar capabilities and since launch in 2012, is becoming more popular, as more customers meet its prerequisite, which is the HANA database.

Most recent product, SAP Social Engagement solution is offered under cloud-based model. It combines online and in-house customer data along with enterprise-wide collaboration, which allows to understand the full context and effectively respond in minutes. It can route as well as prioritize messages from multiple channels, and provides native integration with Twitter and Facebook.