With the development of social media, the business environment has become more complex and dynamic than ever before. Effective and prompt analysis of social media content provides a business with vital competitive power. In order to maximize the strategic function of social media, we integrate a competitive intelligence analysis method, event timeline analysis, with natural language processing technologies (sentiment analysis, entity and event extraction) and information visualization. This results in a novel social media analysis model, SoMEST. We demonstrate the use of the model with a practical example.