Monitoring of social networking sites is catching on in the region, as businesses are increasingly considering the opinion of online consumers. A recent report by SpotOn PR said currently there are more than 400 brands on Twitter alone.
Social Eyez, the social media monitoring agency, said it has seen 50 per cent month-on-month growth in its client base and 230 per cent growth in its billings. Fadl Al Tarzi, Managing Partner of Social Eyez and Chief Operating Officer of News Group, said the company has signed a contract with Mashreq bank to provide it with social network tracking services, in addition to two other banks.
In fact, the new Arabic social network monitoring service has come to the aid of government bodies and the private sector as social networks exert an increasing influence on local perceptions of brands and services.
Mazen Nahawi, President of News Group International, the mother company of Social Eyez, confirmed that Social Eyez currently has three to four government clients. Speaking to Emirates Business, Al Tarzi said:"We are seeing substantial growth, both in clients and in the volume of spend on additional and more sophisticated services."
He added: "Alomst 90 per cent of our clients require a form of an analytic service, a great development from the traditional media tracking."
Social Eyez, the new service under the Media Watch umbrella, is claimed to be the first to monitor Arabic content within social networks, according to Nahawi.
Meanwhile, Social Eyez released a special 'buzz' report on the Apple iPad launched last month. It showed 26 per cent of comments on the web were positive towards the product. This "reflects a deeply entrenched brand evoking a strong favourable reaction".
Social Eyez released the report on iPad to gain the attention of marketers and to show them what role social media monitoring agency can play. The report is just a sample of the work the agency undertakes, said a Social Eyez media representative.
According to the report, the total number of conversations on Apple iPad recorded in the region was 1,148. This is equivalent to 1.4 per cent of total conversations about Apple iPad in the world, of which a majority was recorded in the US.
A media representative for Social Eyez said the percentage of positive comments was not bad at all. "In fact, there is an indication of a major positive response, knowing that the rate of the negative comments was mere 3.2 per cent," said the representative. The rest were neutral comments.
According to the report, which analysed comments posted between March 28 and April 15 in the Middle East, 88 per cent of the conversations about the product in the region came from Egypt, the UAE, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Tunisia.
Microblogs dominated as the top host of such conversations at a rate of 77 per cent, followed by Youtube and forums.pcworld.com, with conversations "peaking a few days before the US launch at a rate of 3,680 conversations per day", the report said.
On the other hand, Arabcrunch.com, an online technology website, also had hosted a discussion on iPad and most of the responses were negative, such as limited functionality, inflated price-tag and large size compared to iPhone and iPod.
Also, Apple's announcement that it would delay its international launch scheduled for end-April due to the shortage in production, proved to trigger a wave of negative sentiment in international markets.
This was despite Apple's announcement on the delay in its global launch on April 14, which said: "Although we have delivered more than 500,000 iPads in the first week, demand is far higher than we predicted and will likely continue to exceed our supply...We have also taken a large number of pre-orders for iPad 3G models... Faced with this surprisingly strong US demand, we have made the difficult decision to postpone the international launch of iPad until the end of May."
By Dima Hamadeh
© Emirates Business 24/7 2010
