Social Media Insights


The explosive growth of social media in the Middle East have made monitoring such spaces critical to gaining insight into the region. 42% of the population in the Middle East is online - with this number rapidly growing - 88% of users in this segment are on social media daily. Across the region, Facebook now has 136 million monthly users.

The Middle East culturally and linguistically diverse, meaning that few firms are capable of monitoring and analysing content from across the region. Decipher’s team is capable of monitoring all Arabic dialects, as well as other regional languages such as Persian and Kurdish. In addition to platforms widely used in western countries, such as Facebook and Twitter, our teams monitor locally popular broadcast platforms such as Telegram, Whatsapp and forums.

Decipher offers language-enabled social media monitoring services to collect both commercial and political intelligence.

Commercial

Decipher offers linguistic support to companies in rolling out social media engagement campaigns in new markets. This can involve community management, marketing localization and social media monitoring. The process of monitoring social media allows companies to understand consumer sentiment, which many can vastly differ across geographies and is key to brand reputation and development. Our language-enabled social media monitoring services allow clients to:

  • Assess the effectiveness of existing market strategy
  • Gain insight into public sentiment surrounding a given brand
  • Survey and plan market segmentation
  • Identify current trends, informing marketing and product development decisions
  • Identify negative sentiment before it trends and take corrective action

Security

The use of social media is crucial to understanding the security environment in the Middle East. As much of the media in the region is state-controlled and censored, security assessments made through mainstream media are unlikely to reflect a comprehensive understanding of the situation on the ground. Our social media monitoring service can help business to preemptively identify internal and external threats. Foreign companies in the Middle East often face difficulty in recruiting a workforce that can be entrusted with maintaining the security and reputation of their business. Decipher’s monitoring service provides clients with insight into what is being said by their workforce online, enabling them to counteract leaks of sensitive information or malicious acts by disgruntled employees. Social media monitoring also allows companies to prevent negative sentiment from spreading to the wider public, which in some instances can translate into an external threat to the security of a business. Social media monitoring also allows clients to effectively assess the security situation in locations of interest. Social media monitoring can provide advanced warning of diverse external threats, including:

  • Riots, civil unrest and terrorism - physical threats against an organization and its facilities
  • Information leaks - customer or employee data, IP breaches
  • Unauthorised use of corporate social media accounts
  • Public discussion of physical security measures (photos of secure facilities, ID cards)
  • Compliance risks, such as employee abuse, supply chain risk, staff misconduct.