Abstract
The paper describes the current situation and trends in the field of social media monitoring. The work introduces available tools and deals with specific problematic issues connected with monitoring both on a local and a global level.
It showcases possibilities of use of monitoring for both companies and institutions, explains ways of using the results, lists free and commercial services and goes more in depth in description of issues connected with automatic sentiment analysis or measuring of importance of results. A part of the presentation is dedicated to introduce actual statistics about usage of social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, Linked and other) in Czech Republic and Slovakia and analysis of user behavior in them based on large datasets.
With a dramatic growth of both individual and company users of social networks the structure and form of communication has significantly changed - and that's where the actual urgent need for monitoring comes from. Since without knowing the context, the communication setup (in a reasonable and constructive way) becomes a much complicated issue.
Social media monitoring can thus substantially help in research of information ecology in the hiatus of social networks, which create a new, dynamic field of study.