The new software as a service platform scans “innumerable web sources” such as social networks, blogs, news feeds and review boards for mentions of topics that the user has chosen. From there, the tool’s built-in analytics and reporting capabilities provide information such as sentiment analysis and ranking of the most important topics.

Voxco said that as well as targeting the market research industry, Acuity4 Social is aimed at the general business market and public institutions.

Raymond Cyr, the firm’s chairman said: “We believe the core value of social media monitoring tools is in the analysis, not in the monitoring they provide. Gathering millions of posts and comments from the web has little value if this enormous amount of information is not synthesised, analysed and organised in a way that decision-makers can act upon.”