A big flood of big data runs through social media. During the last years, social media monitoring has become an activity for many people with an interest into the online world.

Now, there's also a platform for researchers and planners designed by researchers and planners: Pulsar Trac. Made by new media agency Face (London), with the coordination by Francesco D'Orazio (chief innovation officer Face), this platform allows to mine big social data by topic (keyword tracking), reach (visibility analysis), audience (mapping and segmentation) and content (diffusion through networks).

And today the web is becoming increasingly visual web. In this area, Curalate (offices in New York and Philadelphia) is a platform that applies advanced image analytics to social media conversations to give insights available for Pinterest and Instagram.

So, the social media monitoring is becoming an activity with a large range of choices, and the next frontier in this field could be an area beyond the "traditional" social media monitoring, with more refined metrics and parameters.