The Internet of Things (IoT) [IEEE Internet of Things Journal] is already exploited by companies, towards improving their operation at almost every level of their business and interactions with the customers. Twenty-five billion fully interconnected smart objects exist today, while this number is expected to increase up to fifty billion Internet-connected things by 2020, according to Cisco [Technical Report, 2015]. The number of such smart objects in use will surpass the number of smartphones, tablets and PCs combined, representing a great opportunity for companies. The IoT technology will be a source of many benefits to our lives and it will clearly have a great impact on the economy, by introducing new business models, improving efficiency, and generating new forms of revenues.
Social “Objects”
In addition, the evolution of social media is tremendous, enabling globally billions of users to socially interact. This number is expected to exponentially increase, after the adoption of emerging mobile computing networks (i.e. 5G mobile networks) and future wireless services. The convergence of social media and the smart objects era services, introduces new social interactions, promising for building a smarter world with social IoT (SIoT) applications [Zhang & Jin, 2015]. In SIoT, all smart objects are socialized and social relationships can be established among them. For this purpose, novel data fusion algorithms and artificial intelligence techniques will be exploited to adopt automated decision-making and support efficient social communication and collaboration among smart objects.
The objectives being pursued by the SIoT are to keep separate the two levels of humans and smart objects, enabling things to have their own social networks and interactions. Many business applications and services in the future will be associated with different groups of objects, where things will establish friendship’s relationship to the achievement of mutual benefits. For instance, this could be the case of cooperative services, which are designed, towards reducing the energy consumption of mobile devices. Towards developing such scenarios, the smart objects should start establishing social relationships on the basis of their profile, their activities (e.g. movement), as well as their interests.
A New Era in Social Media Marketing & Monitoring
Social media companies are already preparing for this new SIoT era, adopting new strategies for the future, where every smart device will be socially interconnected. Smart objects will be optimized for use with social media, allowing automated posts and shares to be regularly generated by the devices themselves. Marketers will be able to predict the development of new social communities among the smart objects, trying to reach potential customers that may not have previously been available. IoT devices, when coupled with social media, will allow marketers to identify and take advantage of new emerging trends.
For this purpose, new social media monitoring [Waddington & Smith, 2015] techniques have to be introduced, optimizing the collection and analysis of marketing insights data, for efficient social media analytics in the SIoT era. This will enable smarter companies’ operations and decisions, changing the business landscape, as it is known today. As businesses try to find an effective manner to monitor and analyze data that is collected from social media platforms, the SIoT interconnected devices will offer them a suitable way for insights data collection. Towards this direction, businesses can take important decisions for their marketing strategy, by analyzing such data that will be gathered with the use of IoT-enabled social media monitoring applications.
In this context, the new social media monitoring tools will work in collaboration with billions of socially-enabled IoT devices in an emerging social media era. Businesses and organizations will gain incredible opportunities, by exploiting such capabilities by the future social media monitoring tools to enhance their brand name and web presence.
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