KASHKIN, V., ANDROSIK, Y. USING SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICS AND PARSING PROGRAMS TO IDENTIFY AND ANALYZE THE TARGET AUDIENCE Business Excellence and Management Volume 14 Issue 1 / March 2024 ent 61 USING SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICS AND PARSING PROGRAMS TO IDENTIFY AND ANALYZE THE TARGET AUDIENCE Vasily KASHKIN American University of Phnom Penh, Cambodia vasily@kashkin.com.cn Yuriy ANDROSIK Belarusian State Technological University, Minsk, Belarus androsik@belstu.by Abstract Social media analytics is the backbone of successful marketing. It allows you to accurately find and understand the target audience of the company. However, this requires analyzing a huge amount of publicly available data. This is where software tools come to the rescue, allowing such analysis to be carried out in real time. Nevertheless, there are a large number of software products on the market, each of which has a different set of functions - from complex products to highly specialized ones. A wide or vice versa narrow range of functions makes it difficult to choose a specific software solution for a specific task. For this reason, the main purpose of the article is to make a comparative analysis of the functions of the most popular social media analytics software tools designed to identify and analyze the target audience. Keywords: Social network, Social media, Social media analytics, Social media analytics software tools, Text analytics, Image analytics, Audio analytics, Video analytics, Target audience. DOI: https://doi.org/10.24818/beman/2024.14.1-04 1. INTRODUCTION In the modern world, social networks are becoming increasingly popular and, in fact, are the driving force for the dissemination of information in various fields, including business. From an economic point of view, the reason for such popularity lies in the low costs of creating, receiving and disseminating information, and everywhere, that is, with a fairly wide coverage of an audience that goes beyond any one country. 2. LITERATURE REVIEW In international literature, there is still no single and clear definition of social networks, with which most scientists and practitioners would agree. Basically, the term “social media” is used to describe various online channels and online platforms where various kinds of information are created and shared. This may