Social media is of increasing importance to everyone, particularly businesses – reputations can be made and destroyed on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. A survey carried out in 2015 showed that a striking 63% of people rely on Twitter and Facebook for their news – a huge percentage of the population, and a marked increase from 2013 when the figure was 52% (for Twitter) and 47% (for Facebook). All the more reason for Integrating Twitter and Facebook content into your company portal.
Integrating Twitter & Facebook content
Although the same percentage of users get their news on both social networks, there are significant differences in their potential as news distribution channels. The proportion of users who say they follow breaking news on Twitter, for example, is nearly twice as high as those who do so on Facebook (59% vs. 31%) – this seems to support the view that Twitter’s great strength is providing as-it-happens coverage and commentary on live events.
This constant stream of Twitter news will contain both positive and negative opinions about companies, their products, and even individual employees such as board members or spokespersons. Just look at recent news about the conflict between Apple and the FBI concerning the security of iPhones.
As a business, it’s important to be up to date with all this content. You need to know everything that’s being said about your products or company – good and bad. Or maybe you want to track information about your competitors, and keep a close eye on competing products. So how would it be if your senior management could access a dashboard with this very information, on their computer or mobile, updated 24 hours a day?
With this goal in mind, BSL has developed software for use by international clients: Social Media Gateways.
The BSL Twitter Gateway
Our Twitter Gateway continually searches Twitter, creating a real-time database of news that meets the specific interests of our clients. The database content can be used in the following ways:
- to create custom dashboards of content, which can be securely browsed or monitored by authorized personnel
- for distribution to all personnel via a corporate News Portal, or via mail.
- to create a continually-updated display of how a client’s company is performing in social media, processed using sentiment analysis technology.
Integrating Twitter – how it works
Imagine that you want to know everything being said about your company online, as well as comments on your products / services. How can we find the relevant news, and how can we integrate this into a news portal?
Our solution is simple, and easy-to-use. You define search profiles that describe the news in which you’re interested, using attributes of the Tweets in which you’re interested:
- include the twitter names of people whose opinions matter to you (for example @BBCnews, @bbcnickrobinson @BBCAlagiah, @FrankRGardner
- include #tags for the name of your company or names of other companies you find important (#Belastingdienst, #PWC, #INGNL)
- include other keywords, such as ‘insurance’, or ‘mortgage’ or ‘consumer’, words that can be found anywhere in Tweets
- select lists you curate in Twitter (a Twitter list is a curated group of Twitter accounts. Viewing a list timeline will show you a stream of Tweets only from the accounts on that list).
Once the profile is defined, you can give this collection of attributes a name (such as ‘Competitors’ or ‘All about my employer’) and define how frequently the contents should be updated. You can of course test the search profile, fine-tuning and updating it at any time, to ensure that it closely matches the type of content you want to receive.
It’s then just a matter of sitting back and waiting for the news to arrive in your inbox. Or in the case of our latest client, the content is streamed to their private news portal, for browsing online. A single click on any selected Tweet will open the original tweet, and any connected image or other (multimedia) content.
Flexibility
Integrating Twitter and Facebook content is quick and easy. Each employee can create as many or as few of these search profiles as they wish, and can share them with colleagues throughout their organization. Our Twitter Gateway updates each profile’s content every day – or even every minute, depending on the options that have been selected – creating a real-time stream of news content. And when linked to other technology we have available, we can perform detailed semantic analyses on the content. For example, we can create the simple ‘thumbs up’ / ‘thumbs down’ analysis shown above. Or we can grade the news, displaying the results in a custom dashboard that shows your company’s position in the news at a glance.
Social Media integration for your business?
Are you interested in Integrating Twitter and Facebook content into your business – checking your company performance in social media? Do you want easy access to real-time news about your organization and/or your products and services? Then you’ve come to the right address! Get in touch with the Bright Side of Life, and find out how we can help you create your own custom news solution or social news browser!
