Brandwatch: social listening platform

Overview — Brandwatch is a social-listening platform used to monitor topics relevant to policy interests and to carry out desk research to inform communications. The part used here, Brandwatch Consumer Research, extracts insights from public social-media conversations across a wide range of sources (such as X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, review sites, news sites, forums and blogs). Most use involves search functionality, but some features use AI to deliver results.

How it is used — The Strategy and Insight, Marketing, Strategic Communications and Social Content teams use Brandwatch to monitor the performance of owned social content, evaluate reactions to published content, monitor topics relevant to policy interests, carry out desk research, monitor demographics on X, and monitor and evaluate campaign performance, particularly the reach and engagement of partnerships activity among partners and stakeholders. Some AI-enabled features may be used occasionally: a closed GPT function that summarises the data collected via a query, persona-building in Social Panels, and a query-builder feature. These features can be turned off in the settings if needed.

Scope and limitations — Brandwatch is used principally to explore the performance of owned and paid-for content, conduct desk research into attitudes towards a topic when guided by policy requirements, and monitor and evaluate campaign performance; on occasion it is used to evaluate reactions to published content and monitor demographics on X.

• Enables monitoring of the performance of communications activity in social channels in real time as part of a holistic evaluation process.
• Helps evaluate the reach and engagement of partnerships activity among partners and stakeholders.
• Helps understand people's attitudes to, and awareness of and interest in, a particular topic, which helps inform communications.