Social media monitoring tools are extremely useful for understanding the information environment. It is possible to save time, effort, and resources. The more the user wants to get into details, the more differences will appear—giants like Brandwatch, Meltwater, Sprinklr and Digimind will have the most features, their tools answer questions users might not even think of asking (for e.g., analysing picture content), they provide and analyse an enormous amount of information. Simpler tools also have their advantages — it is much easier to learn everything about the tool, and each of them has specific benefits.
The purpose of this research is to develop criteria on how to compare social media monitoring tools and then gather information on those tools to understand what the market offers. The developed criteria could be used independently by government and military agencies to make the decision about subscribing to a certain product, even if it is not covered in this report. This work will provide an understanding of how different government and military agencies can benefit from these tools, whether it is a smaller agency with a smaller budget and team dedicated to this task, or a larger institution, which can allocate more finances and workload on this objective.
