Social Media Monitoring visualisation: What do we have to look for?

The need for accurate and readily understandable social media monitoring is an issue faced by any organisation irrespective of their size or current levels of engagement with social media. It is increasingly a truism of social media that if an organisation does not set out to manage and build their profile positively then someone else will build it anyway in whatever form they care to shape. This short paper examines the visual representation of the impact of Facebook liking activity. The emphasis is on the reverse and negative effects of the less commonly reported effects of decay rates or ‘unliking’. By employing visualisations through this paper it is also an exploration of the mechanisms by which social media monitoring can become an integral aspect of management information reporting and decision making. The overall question posed by this work is what aspects of social media monitoring can provide clear benefits to an organisation and ultimately what social media objectives create genuine value for an organisation?