A lot of new startups come up with the same concept lately: Social Media Analytics. Indeed Social Media is a significant phenomenon in Indonesia, #2 for Facebook, #3 for Twitter, #2 for Foursquare and other social media services are quite popular for internet users in Indonesia. And globally, social media is very promising.
That kind of conclusion is not taken without reason, with huge market-cap (which still be growing for years ahead), Social Media Analytics in Indonesia can be said as promising objective for startup.
Let’s take Scarplr for example; it pivoted from task management service into Social Media Analytics called Trendiest. Other service are Mediawave, and the one recently launched Katapedia. All of them are open for public service, while I know there are more application providers that sell similar application for digital agency, all with similar concept. And this is only in Indonesia.
If you google “social media analytics”, you’ll find tens of tools in search result. This shows the level of competition in this area. At the end of the day, the one who’ll succeed is the one who make the most sell and get the most clients, and with similar –close to the same- features, success factor will rely on marketing strategy and pricing.
Can Trendiest, MediaWave and Katapedia survive the competition? Maybe.
The determinant factor will be which one of the three services can market their product better than the rest, with interesting pricing strategy for users and clients. The competition will be a lot more fiery when services like Brandtology enters Indonesia, or when Google release similar service, or Twitter suddenly release their Twitter Analytics (as rumor said). When this happen, it will be difficult for Trendiest, MediaWave and Katapedia to join the competition, because they depend on Twitter platform and crawled social media sites.
Frankly, I feel pessimistic. I mean seeing most websites are dependant to crawled platform, it’s just a matter of time until Twitter and Facebook close that access to release their own analytic services, and these services will become irrelevant. Unless the services can be more “free” from being platforms dependant, they might have opportunity, I’m just not sure for how long.
Translated by Nita Sellya.
