Loading…
Brandwatch
. It uses AI and data analytics to track online conversations across millions of sources, helping businesses monitor brand reputation, analyze consumer sentiment, and manage social media publishing and engagement.
- 33 posts summarised
- latest
The Good Stuff
Paid picks we use ourselves. Links carry a referral code — a subscription through one earns us a commission at no extra cost to you.
From their blog
Latest articles
7 new Brandwatch AI updates that make your life easier
Brandwatch introduced seven AI-powered updates to help analysts, marketers, and social media managers keep pace with fast-moving online conversations. Iris AI features like Query Writer and Query Fixer streamline building comprehensive research queries by allowing a user to describe a topic through chat. The Ask Iris AI chat on the homepage and dashboards delivers instant summaries and topic breakdowns without requiring a pre-built query. Enhanced Alert and Signal emails now include AI-generated summaries so users can assess breaking stories or issues without reading individual mentions. Other updates include AI-generated categories for segmenting datasets, industry benchmarks for social performance, semantic search for YouTube creator discovery, and automated message classifiers in Engage.
Social Media Management & Consumer Intelligence | Brandwatch
Brandwatch describes an all-in-one social media suite that combines AI, analytics, channel management, consumer intelligence, and specialized tools for enterprise teams. Its consumer-intelligence offering provides access to the world’s largest archive of consumer opinion and uses proprietary and generative AI to identify emerging trends, while threat monitoring covers more than 100 million sources with real-time alerts. A collaborative content calendar supports channels, teams, workflows, approvals, and campaigns, and a unified social inbox handles community management and customer support across networks. The stated goal is to help organizations make better decisions, align content with their brands, respond quickly to threats, and produce measurable results and return on investment; the page also cites recognition by industry analysts and customer trust.
5 Social Media News Stories You Need to Read This Week
This roundup compiles social-media news updates published across August 2026, July 2026, June 2026, and December 2024, covering creator monetization, advertising, platform features, and policy developments. Instagram tested invitation-only seasonal bonuses for Reels and posts in South Korea and the U.S., while Meta enabled ad payments through stablecoin wallets supporting USDC; TikTok’s Dreamina Seedance 2.5 expanded video generation to 30 seconds and accepted up to 50 multimodal references. Other updates include LinkedIn comment ranking and surfacing changes, X’s Live Studio, Threads’ private likes and live-chat tools, and TikTok Pro Events. The roundup also reports a teased MySpace relaunch, new discovery and profile features across platforms, Instagram live location sharing, X parody-account labels, and a potential U.S. TikTok ban.
Measuring campaign impact with social and search data
Campaign post-mortems often report reach, engagement, impressions, and sentiment without establishing whether a campaign changed perception or behavior. It argues that social listening should measure sentiment, themes, mention volume, and audience conversation shifts, while search intelligence measures category and branded demand, promoted benefits, and share of search. A client example contrasts a campaign that generated strong social buzz while category search declined with a later campaign that reversed declining demand, captured two-thirds of share of search, and grew search intent 134%. The difference was attributed to combining socially engaging creative with media strategy and messaging designed to drive search demand. The proposed framework aligns measurement with campaign goals and uses gaps between social sentiment and search intent to identify awareness without demand, existing intent without audience expansion, or stronger market impact.
Why Enterprise Intelligence Needs Purpose-Built AI
Enterprise intelligence requires more than the plausible answers produced by general-purpose LLMs: it needs accurate insights from vast real-world brand data, supported by statistics, governance, and domain expertise. LLMs can hallucinate, miss context, produce inconsistent answers, and rely on limited, non-randomly sampled sources, making them unsuitable as the sole basis for high-stakes decisions. The article argues for matching technologies to tasks, using statistical models for quantitative problems such as social and online-news Reach, specialized classifiers for other tasks, and generative AI to synthesize model outputs. At enterprise scale, crisis and reputation use cases also demand near-real-time speed, consistency, predictability, explainability, auditability, monitoring, and bias testing. LLMs still have a role, including as orchestrators grounded in high-quality data, workflows, specialized models, and rigorous evaluation; the proposed future combines varied models rather than choosing between LLMs and traditional AI.
14 Social Media Holiday to Celebrate This September
The September social media calendar features 14 holidays and events that brands can use to plan content, connect with audiences, and encourage engagement. The list spans World Letter Writing Day, International Day of Charity, Labor Day, International Literacy Day, National Video Games Day, International Equal Pay Day, and International Podcast Day, among others. Each entry pairs its date and hashtag with a suggested angle, such as handwritten letters, employee recognition, literacy infographics, gaming contests, equal-pay advocacy, or sustainable travel destinations. The calendar also includes September 11’s National Day of Service and Remembrance, Hobbit Day, the First Day of Fall, and World Tourism Day, with ideas ranging from commemoration and themed visuals to seasonal recommendations and education. It closes by directing readers to a 2026 social media holiday calendar for further content-planning ideas.
Which brand won the football tournament footwear battle
An analysis of footwear conversations around the 2026 World Cup compares how sponsorship, search demand, social attention, and sentiment shaped the competition between Adidas, Nike, Puma, New Balance, and other brands. Consumer Research tracked tournament-related mentions from June 11 to July 19 and paired them with search queries across the US, UK, and Canada. Adidas led tournament-specific footwear conversation with 63% of mentions, while Nike led broader brand discussion with 995k mentions, brand search momentum, and 78% positive sentiment. Nike’s cultural activations, including LISA’s “Rip The Script” campaign and Ronaldo’s Mercurial moments, generated shareable attention, whereas Adidas benefited from official sponsorship, the Trionda match ball, and player storytelling. Pink cleats became a cross-brand liability, attracting more than 5.5k mentions with nearly 70% negative sentiment, showing that visibility did not automatically produce favorable attention.
5 non-sponsor brand moments during this football summer
This analysis examines how five non-sponsor brands used football-related moments to gain attention without buying official tournament partnerships. Consumer Research tracked brand mentions in public social and news content from June 11 to July 8, identifying responses to clean-stadium rules, fan travel, beer shortages, and rising ranch interest. Levi’s covered-logo campaign generated 20.1k mentions, while Heinz’s taped condiment packaging produced 5.1k; Miller Lite and Delta reacted to the Tartan Army with a beer barge and airport welcome. Kraft followed a TSA post with a limited-edition “TSA-Compliant Ranch” kit, recording over 4k mentions and a 3,998% increase over the previous timeframe. The examples support a model based on speed, authenticity, and real-time listening, with social and search signals helping brands act while trends are building.
18 Social Media Holidays to Celebrate This August
The post presents 18 August holidays that brands can use to plan social media content and connect with their online communities. Dates range from World Wide Web Day and Respect for Parents Day on August 1 to National Dog Day and National Women’s Equality Day on August 26. Each entry supplies a hashtag, a short description of the occasion, and a content suggestion, including polls, infographics, employee stories, charitable spotlights, recipes, jokes, and photographic timelines. The themes span digital history, family, books, relaxation, youth, wildlife, finance, visual storytelling, humanitarian action, entrepreneurship, and equality, with recommendations tailored to community participation or organizational initiatives and campaigns. It closes by positioning the list as a way to support Q3 goals and directing readers to a 2026 Social Media Holiday Calendar.
Ranch, Refills, and Viking Rows: Inside Football Fan Culture
Consumer Research tracked close to 32.6 million tournament-related mentions from June 10 to June 28 to examine how fans experienced the tournament through food, beverages, celebrations, and public events. International visitors reacted strongly to American staples: ranch dressing reached 70.3k mentions, free refills 45k, free or unlimited bread more than 30k, and barbecue nearly 64k, while Google interest in “ranch dressing” rose 586.4% and “ranch dressing ingredients” 600%. The experience also exposed friction, with stadium beers costing more than $20 and hydration breaks drawing negative sentiment in over 79% of sentiment-categorized mentions. Watch parties generated over 226k mentions, and New York held 22% of host-city watch-party conversation, offering alternatives to stadium prices. Norway’s “Viking Row” reached nearly 229k mentions, showing how organic fan rituals can spread across borders and create fast-moving opportunities for brands.
13 Social Media Holidays to Celebrate This July
This calendar presents 13 unofficial social media holidays for July 2026, giving brands occasions to engage audiences through patriotism, culture, kindness, humor, and food. It lists dates from International Joke Day on July 1 through International Day of Friendship on July 30, including two observances on July 18 and two joke-focused days. Each entry pairs the observance with a suggested engagement prompt, such as asking for favorite jokes, running polls, inviting emoji-only stories, collecting acts of kindness, or encouraging friends to share appreciation. The recommendations span educational, entertaining, inspirational, and community-oriented content, with examples tied to Independence Day, World Emoji Day, and National Ice Cream Day. It is positioned as a way to shape social content during the second half of 2026.
Why Global Brands Need APAC Social Intelligence
Western-only social listening strategies can miss consumer conversations and early signals in APAC, where platforms shape culture, purchasing trends, and product discovery. APAC sources matter because RedNote (Xiaohongshu) combines search-led recommendations, reviews, lifestyle content, and social commerce, while WeChat connects messaging, communities, payments, e-commerce, customer service, and purchases across a customer lifecycle. Sina Weibo provides a fast-moving view of public sentiment, entertainment, influencer culture, launches, and controversies, with narratives sometimes spreading to global coverage and international platforms. Together, these sources show how trends form, buying decisions develop, and narratives evolve across regions, rather than only what people say about brands. The stated conclusion is that brands should expand listening beyond Western platforms to identify trends earlier, understand high-intent behavior in real time, and make more globally relevant decisions.
18 Social Media Holidays to Celebrate This June
June’s social media calendar presents 18 observances, combining lighthearted dates such as National Donut Day and National Take Your Dog to Work Day with causes including ocean conservation and blood donation. It positions the holidays as prompts for brands to engage online communities through polls, carousels, infographics, videos, challenges, and behind-the-scenes posts. Suggested hashtags and content ideas range from a childhood-memory question and donut personality poll to environmental restoration visuals, ocean-health graphics, blood-donation myth busting, and a collaborative summer playlist. June 21 carries several entries—Father’s Day, the first day of summer, International Yoga Day, National Selfie Day, World Music Day, and National Take Your Dog to Work Day—while later guidance covers sunglasses and Social Media Day content creation.
Are you winning in AI search? Do this self-assessment.
AI search is reshaping consumer discovery, but the post says most brands do not know what AI platforms say about them. It presents a four-step assessment: choose one country, define a focused category, identify roughly 100 consumer questions, and test whether the brand appears in answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Search Intelligence platforms track queries, mentions, recommendations, citations, and content gaps across search and AI tools. The post recommends answering real queries with dedicated content, earning coverage from accessible independent sources, participating helpfully in online conversations, and monitoring AI answers monthly because they change. Its examples report a 25% reduction in Orange call-center contacts, 50% lower Campari costs, and Aromazon reaching €40 million in annual revenue.
How to Influence LLM Responses: A Guide to AI Visibility
AI tools increasingly answer consumer questions directly, reducing click-throughs while making remaining referrals more likely to convert, according to the Post. Brands therefore need to influence the broader information environment that shapes LLM recommendations, not merely optimize the URLs shown as citations. LLMs draw on owned content, earned media, and social conversations, including crawlable trade publications, industry blogs, Reddit, forums, and podcast transcripts. A telecommunications brand illustrates the owned-content route: after identifying real troubleshooting questions and publishing targeted answers, it reduced call center contact volume by 25% and improved issue resolution. The guidance also stresses concrete claims, authentic participation, and monitoring outdated or inaccurate narratives to build fresher context around a brand.
Finance Trends 2026: Free Trials, BNPL, and Revoked Benefits
Brandwatch Consumer Research examined finance-related online conversations and found that negativity is increasing, with negative mentions up 21% between March 1, 2025, and March 1, 2026. The analysis identifies three major sources of frustration: free trials that convert into subscriptions through unclear pricing or cancellation practices, brands removing or replacing previously free benefits, and buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) services associated with overspending, debt, and financial stress. Mentions of free trials rose 45%, denied-refund mentions in those discussions rose 107%, benefit downgrades or removals rose 19%, and BNPL’s negative sentiment increased almost 600%. Drawing on 609 million conversations from social media, forums, review sites, and blogs over 12 months, the report recommends consent, advance notice, customer education, and financial-literacy support.
Social Media Analytics: Key Insights for Business Success
Social media analytics involves gathering, analyzing, and interpreting social media data to understand audience behavior, evaluate channels and campaigns, and guide future plans. The guide covers the workflow from collection through interpretation and strategic adjustment, including engagement, reach, sentiment, audience, competitor, and conversion metrics. It recommends tools such as Brandwatch, Google Analytics, Sprout Social, Hootsuite Analytics, and Meta Business Suite, while noting that tool choice depends on needs and budget; integrations can centralize multiple platforms. The guidance emphasizes aligning metrics with business goals, automating collection, combining cross-platform data, benchmarking competitors, using historical trends, and turning findings into content and campaign changes. It also addresses attribution, platform changes, privacy, and emerging uses of AI, predictive, real-time, unified, video, and audio analytics.
Global Consumer Insights Ahead of 2026 Ramadan
Ramadan reshapes daily routines, online activity, spending, dining, and hospitality, making it a major consumer and cultural moment across Muslim regions. Drawing on nearly 7 million English- and Arabic-language online conversations from 2025, the analysis tracks shopping, food, home aesthetics, hospitality, and regional posting patterns. Ramadan mentions rose 76% in the three months before the 2026 holiday year over year, while fragrance mentions increased 33%, Iftar-party mentions approached 900,000, recipes rose 144%, and Iftar or Suhoor packages and ticketed events rose 145% in 2025. Joy accounted for 57% of emotion-categorized Ramadan mentions, and conversations centered on togetherness, spirituality, traditions, and generosity. Afternoon activity peaks between 2 pm and 4 pm across the analyzed regions, but brands are advised to use their own regional and platform analytics and meet audiences through authentic participation rather than promotion.
LinkedIn Groups Guide: Find, Join, and Create
LinkedIn Groups bring professionals and businesses together around shared interests, industries, and goals, offering more targeted discussions than the main feed. The guide explains how to search for groups by keyword or name, filter results, assess activity and post quality, review rules, and join instantly or request approval from an admin. It also outlines group creation through the For Business menu, covering names, descriptions, images, industries, locations, privacy, rules, and member permissions. Public and private status is fixed after creation, while private groups can be listed or unlisted, with unlisted groups requiring an existing member’s invitation. To sustain participation, owners are advised to invite relevant connections, welcome members, respond promptly, moderate posts, and encourage valuable discussions; contributors should prioritize useful content, professional conduct, and relationship building.
Social Media Posting Schedule: 9-Step Guide
Managing multiple social accounts makes consistency, timing, content mix, and collaboration difficult, so the guide presents a nine-step scheduling process. It recommends auditing active and dormant channels, defining goals and KPIs, studying audience behavior and platform differences, selecting a tool, and building a calendar around content pillars, campaigns, roles, and a two-to-four-week planning horizon. The process then covers batch creation, reusable assets, platform-specific captions, approval workflows, analytics, time zones, and flexibility for timely content; Brandwatch Publish is presented as an example supporting TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. It concludes that scheduling should create capacity for engagement and strategy without sacrificing authenticity, and advises regular audits, experimentation, and readiness to pause or adapt queued posts. The guidance also warns against excessive promotion, ignoring engagement, identical cross-platform posts, weak visuals, and over-reliance on automation.
Topics they write about
All topics →Weekly digest
The best engineering reads, once a week.