Business Intelligence offerings are evolving as the big data trend is picking up momentum, and it’s already expanded to just about every corner of the tech industry. This week, Facebook management system Buddy Media released the “Strategies For Effective Facebook Wall Posts: A Statistical Review” study. The research paper aggregated and analyzed data collected from over 200 Buddy Media clients operating in the media, finance and automotive industries as well as others, and reveals some very interesting user engagement rates.

The metrics studied were comments, Likes and engagement rates.

Post Length: On average, posts between one and 80 characters had a 27% higher engagement rate than posts with more than 80 characters, yet accounted for only 19% of all posts.

URL Shorteners: Engagement rates are three times higher for posts that used a full-length URL, rather than a URL shortener.”

Buddy Media also found some interesting results of the timing of posts. Apparently, brands that posted outside normal business hours had 20 percent higher engagement rates on their posts, and Thursday and Friday top the list with 18 percent higher engagement rates than in other days. Moreover, Buddy Media says “events” and “winning” are the keywords associated with promotions that had the highest engagement, while “buy” and “shop” were the least popular keywords.

Buddy Media is using big data to provide insight that businesses can put into practice, and this is becoming especially true as social media metrics develop, and are getting incorporated into BI methods. One very fresh example is SugerCRM, who today announced a team-up with IBM at its annual SugarCon conference. Sugar 6 is now integrated with IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Suite and IBM Websphere Cast Iron, and lets users schedule and host web meetings from within their CRM platform.

This latest release of Sugar 6 also supports Cisco WebEx Meeting Center and Citrix-GoToMeeting, putting an emphasis on mobile. Moreover, users can also access Google Docs within the offering’s interface.