Rate of building the Social Network

This is the second post in the series of Social Network Intelligence.

Companies are spending a lot of marketing money and most companies now have a link to Facebook and Twitter just like they have links to About and Products/Solutions pages. If you don’t, make sure you get the right marketing guys.

Once the companies start focusing on promoting themselves on these Social Networks, they need to constantly measure how they are doing on the networks. It’s not a one time investment and done deal. Depending on the size of the company, it may require dedicated resources either for all the top social networks or even one or more just for each network.

A set of simple but high-level metrics to find out how someone is doing their marketing on the social network front can be

• the rate of friends
• the rate of followers and
• the rate of tweets (conversations)

Let’s take for example these metrics for a couple of Cloud companies. Below are the details for Salesforce, Workday and Oracle Cloud.

The above chart for Salesforce indicates that they send about 32 tweets per day on average. They get 182 followers a day on average (although, the data is skewed due to some event that happened towards end of October that got them lot of followers and friends).

Workday, being relatively new compared to Salesforce (atleast in terms of going public) is doing OK with respect to the number of followers it is amassing every day.

The final chart is for Oracle Cloud. Note that some large companies not only participate on several social networks, they also have specialized social network account/handle for their individual products or offerings. Oracle Cloud Zone on Twitter is a good example of that. As this is relatively new, at present the rate of followers, friends and tweets is relatively low compared to the other two. With time these numbers should drastically increase, although it’s not clear whether having multiple twitter accounts will segregate the user base. Of course, that may not actually be bad as it provides more focused user base.

BTW, these pretty charts are possible only because Twitter graciously shares it’s Social Network data via JSON APIs. The fact that their API version 1.1 forces authentication is a separate issue that I might write a blog post upon OAuth one day regarding the it’s limitations I have bothered to look into after starting to use Twitter API.

Follow the blog to see more interesting metrics that I am going to present in subsequent posts!