Social Media And YOU

As of yesterday September 7th, the world population is estimated at 6.9 billion. Surprisingly, the number of mobile phones across the globe is not far behind. According to Wikipedia, mobile phones population across the globe is approximately over 5 billion.

The battle in the mobile world has upraised during the last decade. Whilst ten years ago, owning a personal mobile phone was restricted to the upper class of the society, today, a mobile phone is but a commodity. In Singapore, you can observe that the working class population, an individual within the range of monthly income of SGD 2,000 (+/- 10%) owns at least 2 mobile phones.

In China, the mobile subscribers population is approximately at 1.3 billion and the mobile phone population is at 900 millions. India is not far behind with a 1.2 billion subscribers and 850 millions mobile phones.

The fragmented competition for the mobile industry paved the way to the various mobile phone operating systems – Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, RIM’s Blackberry OS 7, Samsung Bada, the good old Symbian, Palm’s WebOS, etc.

Aside from the mobile phone operating systems, the stiff market competition gave the pressure for the mobile phone operators to be at its best. It also has created a key trend in 2011, that is the social media networks.

In social media networks, the consumers are analyzed based on their mobile phone behavior and their location based patterns. The numbers that you frequently dialed from your mobile phone is being understood by analysts paving the way to creation of various social media models in order to provide you with the best mobile subscription package that fits your lifestyle.

Location based services on the other hand, analyses the places that you frequently visits. In countries like Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, and even Malaysia, you will notice that a change in your location gives the way for the various advertisings that targets your location. Sometimes, just entering the malls, you will be bombarded with various SMS or text messages from mall boutiques giving away discounts or sales.

Aside from the purely telecommunications social media analysis, mobile applications are also being used for majority of consumer based study. Twitter (http://www.twitter.com) is one of the key source of social media information. It is said that Twitter gave the consumers ‘the freedom of speech’. Hotel and tourism reviews mobile apps (Tripadvisor, Kayak, etc) are also a major contributor for the said study. Foursquare (http://foursquare.com) uses the location based approach in terms of social media. For the businesses, location based marketing paves the way to understanding the location patterns giving the consumers the based packages and promotions that suit their travel, shopping, dining lifestyle, and the like.

While there are a lot of advantages of social media, the major downside of social media networks is the consumer privacy. It can sometimes be exploit and can be used against a consumer for variety of reasons.

As always, I always mention that if you don’t want to be traced and searched, the best way to do so is to turn off thy mobile phone. However, these days not using a mobile phone is like living in the prehistoric stone age.

In our modern world, the business and technology keeps on innovating in order to thrive. And in order to compete and thrive is to give the best to the market audience.

And that is YOU.

Related Post: You’re Tagged And Analyzed

Til next time. Au revoir.

Citations:

– Various citations. Please contact the author.