When Rockstar Games released the first Grand Theft Auto (GTA) 16 years ago, nobody could have guessed that on their fifth installment of the game that the company would make $1 billion worth of sales within 3 days. Grand Theft Auto V was released on September 17th, 5 years after the previous GTA IV and was rumored that production costs were between $200-250 million dollars. So what made this game generate so many sales? Social Media Marketing.
Social media has allowed business to share their products/services for free on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Rockstar Games utilised this and many more marketing tools to get their customers attention. There was a big buzz around GTA V before its release, prompting eager gamers to vent their excitement on Facebook/Twitter which of course was followed by those that were complaining about it. Businesses can use this type of activity for their benefit with simple Social Media Monitoring tools.
Social Media Monitoring tools gives brands a way to analyse their effectiveness. Companies using social media monitoring can add the following values to their virtual identity:
- Measure and manage marketing effectiveness
- Compare statistics with industry/competition
- Develop new potential marketing opportunities
- Insights for more cost effective procedures
One of the social media monitoring tools that I experimented with was Social Mention. Social Mention was very easy to use, however I felt like it was missing a lot of posts and was not gathering the correct information. With a simple “GTA” search the service was able to provide 372 mentions was which derived from the following sources Twitter (100), Photobucket (81), answers_wiki (49), YouTube (48), Facebook (25) and more. This data was the filtered into positive (97) / neutral (262) / negative (13) feedback, which allowed me to view each of these categories. This data is very vague and is generally just comments or status about the gameplay. However, there is one thing that can be assured after using this tool, GTA V rocks!
Social media monitoring can be used by business that are only just beginning, and also by larger companies that are looking to gather insight into their virtual identity. Each monitoring service offers something different for the business allowing them to gather various types of data. With so many services available to monitor a businesses social media, it’s important that the correct research is conducted into this service and also the business to ensure that are correctly utilising this great tool.
Sources:
Jason Collier's Social Blogsphere 