Towards a Framework for Classification and Adoption of Social Media Monitoring Tools

The huge popularity and evolution of the Web in the last decade, and the rapid advances in ICT allowed an exponential growth of the volume and diversity of data produced by social media. The widespread use of social media has encouraged citizens to give their opinions more freely and actively participate in several aspects of modern life. The data provided in this context can have a great impact on business, where often opinions of customers may contribute to the success of a product or service, or destroy the reputation of a brand or a company. The effective and full use of social media by organizations require that they are able to monitor and analyse the high volumes of heterogeneous data that are produced by these media, so as to obtain relevant information and valuable insights for decision making and for conducting their business. Due to the diversity of social media monitoring tools available and wide range of features offered, we propose a framework to classify and guide the process of adoption of such a tool (or set of tools) by an organization. While the design of the framework is still at an early stage, its foundations are presented in this paper.