New tool divines human emotion for a better connection

The tool, Fathom Analytics for Facebook, was created to help small and mid-sized businesses better connect with their consumer base. Rather than a simple listing of likes and shares, though, the tool focuses on the context of posts and likes to determine the emotion of the consumer in question.

"Many people judge the success of their Facebook page using likes," said David Rabjohns, CEO of MotiveQuest and Fathom Research. "But what if people are liking your page to tell you that they hate you, as is the case with most cellular service providers. Our goal was to introduce a simple tool that could analyze Facebook data in a more sophisticated way in order to help people build deeper, more connected relationships."

The tool measures sentiment, so that brands can understand how a social networker is 'speaking' about a brand and from uses real-time Natural Language processing for better understanding of those interactions. The interactions are all measured in real-time so brands can quickly adjust or engage with a consumer through the social network.

How important is social networking? comScore researchers report social networking takes up 33% of the time spent online in Malaysia, for 1 in 5 minutes spent online in Australia and in the US social networking is so popular the mobile-social audience increased 37% between 2010 and 2011. Facebook is the king of the networks; according to Experian/Hitwise Facebook now has a 9% share of visits (week ending 12/3/11), leading all other websites.

Tags: advertising metrics, online advertising, social marketing, targeted ads