Why Social Intelligence is Essential for Competitive Analysis

It is crucial for companies and brands to monitor online conversations about their business and industry. AI-powered social listening and intelligence tools can uncover what customers say on social channels, blogs, forums, and even in videos or podcasts.

By tracking both your brand and your rivals, you learn which narratives are shaping the market and where opportunities or risks may arise.

Social Intelligence as a Competitor Benchmarking Tool

By pulling data from AI-powered social listening and intelligence tools, brands can compare narratives and metrics across communities to determine their competitive advantage.

Competitor benchmarking works like this:

• Share-of-Voice Comparison: You can quantify how often your brand and each competitor are mentioned across channels. A sudden spike in a rival’s mentions alerts you that something is happening (a viral campaign, PR crisis, etc.).
  
• Sentiment & Topics: Beyond volume, brands can gauge whether mentions are positive or negative.
  
• Influencers & Communities: Identify which influencers or forums are driving conversations about your brand.

Brand Competitive Analysis

Comprehensive social listening and intelligence support brand competitive analysis. By understanding your brand’s position relative to others, you can track your own brand’s campaigns and product launches in parallel with your competitors’ and see how the public reacts to each. Narrative intelligence also reveals whether certain keywords (for example, “affordable luxury” or “eco-friendly design”) are more strongly associated with your brand or with a competitor.

Tools like Pendulum cover more than 25 social channels using publicly available data, including Rumble, BitChute, and 4chan. A well-known influencer gave your competitor a shout-out on YouTube, or an industry blog compared your products–all those insights feed back into strategic planning.

The Next-Gen Social Listening Tool

Traditional monitoring tools often only scan text posts or metadata, but platforms like YouTube, BitChute, Rumble, and TikTok are hard to search and even harder to put into context. Pendulum solves this by using accelerated speech-recognition (ASR) to convert video and audio into text.

This means it can spot a brand mention hidden in a podcast interview or extract sentiment from a TikTok. This deep content analysis makes Pendulum especially powerful for social listening.

Key features of Pendulum’s AI-driven listening include:

• Multi-Modal Content Coverage: performs comprehensive audio, video, and text media analysis
  
• Narrative Intelligence: Instead of isolated keywords, it identifies and clusters related posts into evolving narratives, giving companies early warning of issues and shifting consumer interests.
  
• Horizon Scanning: Continually scans ongoing conversations to anticipate sentiment and narrative shifts.
  

AI-powered social intelligence engines and deep media analysis provide marketers with invaluable context for competitive intelligence.

Social listening and intelligence is indispensable for modern competitive intelligence. Using AI and machine learning, you capture not only what’s being said about your brand, but also what’s being said about every competitor. Pendulum helps companies stay one step ahead through brand competitive analysis. ‍

Schedule your demo today to see how Pendulum can help your brand monitoring!

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