Using Social Networking Sites (SNS) for Environmental Scanning: An Analysis of Content Monitoring Tools

In all market segments, social networking sites (SNS) have to be considered an element of value-adding for business, mainly through the possibility of promoting closer interactions between organisations and their customers. Despite this, the main concern is still what is being said on SNS. From this perspective, beyond the diversity of interaction patterns, there are several extra tools (the majority of which are available for free), which intend to aggregate the power of analysis to SNS users. Considering that microblogging platforms are the most widespread in the organisational context, the aim of this paper is to analyse the content monitoring tools available, in order to verify the possibility of utilising them as Environmental Scanning (ES) tools. In this way, it is intended to analyse the basis of ES, the main theories and techniques available, the relationship between ES and virtual environments, especially the internet, and content monitoring tools per se.