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SAS Social Media Analytics Tool Extracts Marketing Data from Social Networks

SAS (www.sas.com), a provider of business analytics software and services, delivers business intelligence to more than 45,000 client sites. Its new enterprise solution product, SAS Social Media Analytics, will tap into online conversation data to help medium and large companies understand, predict, and act on social media data.

The new service can archive and analyze more than 2 years of social media conversations from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, discussion forums, blogs, and more. The on-demand software shows marketers how people feel about their products or brands, who is influencing them, and how social media conversations affect business results. The service should assist in brand strategies, media placement, public relations, and customer care activities.

The company says that SAS Social Media Analytics offers seven distinct advantages:

• Enterprise-level capabilities -- It can collect and analyze huge quantities of data, both structured and unstructured, from internal and external sources. Integrating with CRM and marketing systems, the solution aligns social media monitoring with overall business strategy and tactics.
• A long-term view - A continuous archive of 2+ years of online data enables the system to understand trends and update historical analyses based on new information.
• Predictive analytics - The software can quantify influence, forecast future volume of social media conversations, and then predict their impact on the business.
• Extensible language processing - SAS lets marketers and analysts adjust the rules that assign sentiment to topics and apply subject-matter expertise to improve statistical approaches and better classify text.
• Multi-language support - SAS Social Media Analytics can understand and classify conversations in 13 languages: Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish.
• Ability to take action - The service delivers real-time insights through web-based dashboards, reports, and workflow-enabled alerts.
• Industry expertise - SAS Social Media Analytics provides industry-specific language processing to ensure higher accuracy and relevance.

Source: SAS