Trends
& Foresight
Trend detection and foresight can help you anticipate shifts in consumer behaviour, market dynamics and cultural attitudes. Tools in this category help you stay ahead of the curve by identifying and analysing emerging trends, topics and conversations online.
Trends prediction has long been a coveted feature for social intelligence professionals, and recent advancements are making it more sophisticated and valuable. One emerging concept in this field is narrative intelligence, which focuses on identifying and analysing the stories and narratives that shape public opinion. This capability is proving particularly valuable for brand reputation management and crisis prevention, allowing organisations to understand and potentially influence the broader narratives surrounding their brand.
The combination of predictive modeling and machine learning algorithms is also allowing tools in this category to forecast trends and potential outcomes with greater precision: by including data from various online sources alongside consumer behaviour patterns and search data, these tools can help brands anticipate shifts in cultural attitudes and market dynamics. This approach will enable brands to stay ahead of the curve and make strategic decisions with confidence.
Trends Reporting
Trends Analytics
Trends Prediction
Narrative Threat Analysis
Trends Reporting tools help you find actionable insight from social data more quickly by giving you pre-built reports and analysis of relevant trends, topics and conversations. Instead of having to spend loads of time setting up and configuring these reports yourself, you can get straight to the analysis and begin applying the insights to your marketing or business strategy right away. These tools give you a really handy way to stay informed about the latest developments with your audience or in your market with minimal effort.
Industry trend reports: Understand the latest trends, innovations and developments in your market - such as emerging technologies, consumer preferences and competitive landscape - without having to do extensive research by using pre-built reports.
Consumer trend insights: Use ready-made reports based on the analysis of online conversations and search data to get insights into consumer preferences, opinions and behaviours related to your brand or target audience.
Content performance reports: Use pre-built reports to identify the content themes, formats and distribution channels that do best so that you can improve your content strategy without having to manually collect and analyse data.
Competitive benchmarking reports: Access reports that show how your brand performs against your competitors so that you can track your position in the market, identify opportunities and adapt your strategy to stay ahead.
Niche analysis reports: Get in-depth insights into specific niches, sub-industries or target audiences that are relevant to your brand so that you can learn about their unique trends, challenges and opportunities and tailor your strategy to target a specific market segment.
Trends Analytics tools help you collect, analyse and interpret data about the latest trends and topics relevant to your brand, industry or target audience. They use advanced analytics techniques, including sentiment analysis, topic modelling and data visualisation, to give you actionable insights to help you make better business decisions. This technology goes beyond basic reporting to help you understand the underlying drivers of trends and their potential impact.
Trend identification and tracking: Monitor different online data sources to find trends and topics relevant to your brand and industry so that you can stay informed about new developments and understand the context behind trending conversations.
Sentiment and opinion analysis: Analyse sentiment and opinions in online conversations and content about your brand or competitors to gauge public perception, identify potential issues or opportunities and measure the impact of your marketing and comms campaigns.
Topic and theme analysis: Use NLP and topic modelling techniques to quickly identify themes and sub-themes that are being discussed online so that you can understand key trend drivers, identify niche conversations, and develop targeted content and engagement strategies.
Influencer and key opinion leader (KOL) analysis: Track how influencers and KOLs shape trends and opinions about your brand or industry so that you can engage with potential partners more authentically and measure how effective marketing campaigns that involve them are.
Data visualisation and reporting: Turn complex trend data and insights into visually appealing and easy-to-understand dashboards, reports and presentations to share trend insights with different teams more easily so that they can make more informed decisions.
Trends Prediction technology combines advanced analytics techniques with predictive modelling and machine learning algorithms to help you forecast future trends and potential outcomes so that you can be proactive in your decision-making. These tools analyse historical and real-time data from different online sources alongside consumer behaviour to find patterns that can highlight the key drivers of emerging trends. By doing this, you can anticipate shifts in consumer behaviour, cultural attitudes and market dynamics. This technology takes Trends Analytics one step further.
Trend forecasting and scenario planning: Predict the chances of a trend developing and its potential impact based on historical and real-time data, and expert insights so that you can plan for changes in consumer preferences, market dynamics or competitors’ strategies.
Predictive trend alerts and notifications: Find out about potential trends, viral content or emerging crises before they happen by using predictive models and real-time data analysis so that you can take action quickly.
Trend-based product and service innovation: Discover untapped opportunities, unmet consumer needs and new markets based on trend analysis and predictive insights and apply this to new product development so that you can keep a competitive edge.
Predictive campaign and content optimisation: Forecast how your marketing campaigns, content or social media posts will perform by using predictive algorithms that analyse historical data and audience engagement patterns, and adapt your strategy to maximise their impact.
Risk assessment and mitigation: Work out how emerging trends, viral content or social media crises might impact your reputation or financial performance so that you can develop plans to reduce any potential damage.
Nichefire’s platform can help identify and predict the impact of emerging consumer, political, economic and societal trends. It uses data from across the internet - including news, web traffic, social media, podcasts and search - to help companies “take the pulse of the world”. The company was founded in 2017 by Michael Howard and Khalil El-Amin as a competitive analysis solution. However, in 2022 it became clear that the main problem with existing social listening technology was that it assumed users already knew a bit about the trends they were searching for. There weren’t any tools that could help uncover things they didn’t know: unknown unknowns. And so Nichefire, in its current form, was born.
For Nichefire, the Trends Prediction & Analytics category of social listening tech is so important because it’s the go-to technology for brands who are looking for new opportunities. They can also be the first stop for identifying potential risks too. This gives users the starting point for additional research which they can flesh out with insights from other types of social listening tools, whether that’s Audience & Consumer Intelligence, or Influencer Analytics. As Michael explains, “it adds immense value to the tool stack, just by simply helping you stay on top of those unknown unknowns. And so it's a big driver of where your research can go.”
And it’s not just about identifying risks and new opportunities, trends prediction and analytics is crucial for staying relevant. By fully understanding the cultural trends that are driving online behaviour, you can discover when and where your brand needs to get involved. Or perhaps when it should stay away. As Khalil explains, “understanding what's emerging or what's happening requires you to have an ability to understand millions of inside conversations or jokes all at one time. And I think that that's the space that we wanted to carve out and show, that social listing’s great, but it's not answering all the questions that we have about these things that are emerging.” For this, you need a way to identify these emerging ideas, but also to work out whether they matter for your brand. That’s where Trends Prediction & Analytics tools can help.
This area of social listening has been developing over the last few years. As Michael highlights, “there's definitely more consultancies coming up. And there are some new tools that are tapping into unique data sources.” What is key for this sector though, and where Nichefire is focusing, is understanding how to find those signals from the vast amount of diverse online data sources and working out how they’re going to shape consumer culture. This is something that’s evolving rapidly though, especially since the introduction of generative AI to many of these platforms. In the case of Nichefire’s platform, users can ask a question about any topic and it’ll tell you all of the emerging trends associated with it.
Another area that has been evolving over the last few years for this category is the ability to make predictions taking into account many variables. In the past Trends Prediction & Analytics technology would usually develop prediction models that focused on the evolution of a single variable over a certain time period. However, understanding how trends will evolve is more nuanced than that. You need to consider consumer opinion, what influences that, what things people are interested in etc. Exploring how trends might evolve is very subjective. As a result, these tools - including Nichefire - are now taking into account multiple variables in order to make more accurate predictions about a particular topic.
Whilst the category has come a long way in a really short amount of time, there’s still plenty of room for further development. AI will continue to help these tools advance into areas that haven’t been possible before, “for instance, getting more prescriptive is something that we’re working on. So, how can we make recommendations based on things we see now and how they might evolve in future?” Michael explains.
And as technology in general evolves, how we approach cultural trends will need to adapt. As Khalil points out, “content is changing and how consumers are consuming information and who they’re consuming it from is changing. It's important for us to think about that, especially when it comes to trend spotting. Just 10-15 years ago, you could spot a trend because it was popular on Twitter, or another social media platform. But now, I think you need to understand how consumer behaviour is developing and where the attention is at that moment.” And as this evolves, and the algorithms of the different platforms change to meet new demands, it’s going to change what people see online. And that has a direct impact on culture.
understanding what's emerging or what's happening requires you to have an ability to understand millions of inside conversations or jokes all at one time.
NewsWhip’s predictive media monitoring platform helps comms and insights professionals proactively manage their brand's reputation. They do this by providing a live, quantified view of what's happening across all digital, web and social media so that users can understand what's happening that’s relevant to their brand and, more importantly, how it's likely to evolve next.
And, like their platform, NewsWhip are thinking ahead with their development plans over the next 12 to 18 months and beyond. According to their Chief Product Officer, Dervilla Mullan, NewsWhip’s roadmap for the short-term focuses on three important use cases for their customers: managing live issues that have a reputational impact, understanding wider trends and their broader context, and finding ways to get this information to the wider audience. As Dervilla explains, “they want NewsWhip to help them scale the distribution of those tailored insights by getting them directly to different teams who can use them, whether it's C-suite or marketing and comms teams.”
So how does this translate into product development? Firstly, they’re going to be developing their social timeline which will give a multi-network, 360° view of how conversations develop across the internet. So many people are now using social media as their main source of news and information, which means some of the most damaging stories for brand reputation can start here and spread much more quickly than on traditional news sites. As Dervilla explains, “an issue might start on Reddit, generate a lot of posts there, and then get propagated on to coverage by publishers on the web. But then it gets distributed more widely on Twitter. Other content might fit better with Instagram or TikTok, so the real public interest will start here.” By bringing in this wider context, the social timeline feature will help identify stories that could be a risk to brands, regardless of where they start, and make it easier for brands to see around corners and predict how they might evolve.
Another key area that NewsWhip are focusing on is embedding AI. It’s impossible to ignore this trend across the SITech space because of its potential benefits. For example in summarising extracting meaning from the massive amounts of social data that’s available. NewsWhip have already integrated some elements of AI into their platform, but the next stage will be to use it to answer key questions automatically for their customers. As Dervilla highlights, “We know the types of questions they're asking. How significant is this issue? Where is it spreading? What are the big themes that are driving this narrative? Increasingly we’ll use AI as an agent for users, to assist them in getting those answers automatically.” To develop these features they’re looking to build partnerships with different AI providers from big names like OpenAI and Anthropic, to smaller ones that can help them build it in-house.
However, we all know how unreliable generative AI can be, so NewsWhip are planning to enrich and quantify their data to make sure users can trust it. According to Dervilla, “we score actual engagement with every single article and post, and run a lot of metrics and analysis. We think by coupling AI insight with the rigour of quantifying data, we can give more reliable insights than if you're just asking certain models to extract what they see as the important themes, which might not always be the case…we will always link AI-generated results back to the underlying data so that you can see where an insight came from.” This combination of AI with real, tangible data will give users a fuller picture which they can use to predict the future of a trend, story, or live issue at a glance.
When it comes to helping teams distribute insights across their organisations, they’re looking to improve the summaries that they offer to make them easier for anyone without a data analytics background to understand. They’re also offering “view only” access, to ensure the data and insights can be only configured and managed by experts, but still be used by everyone.
The main benefit to these new features is that users will be able to see the bigger picture of online trends and conversations about them more easily, and as a result predict potential outcomes more quickly. According to Dervilla, “I think that the combination of a complete picture of real-time web and social in a timeline with helping users ‘see around corners’ to a bigger degree will be quite groundbreaking.”
Narrative & Threat Analysis tools help you identify, monitor and analyse potential themes or activities that could impact your brand reputation or operation. They use advanced analytics, NLP and ML techniques to detect potential risks - like misinformation - online and across social media. By using this technology to dig into conversations, themes and sentiment, you can quickly detect and prevent potential crises which might lead to negative press.
Narrative detection and monitoring: Monitor online content to find narratives or themes that could potentially harm your reputation or disrupt your operations and be proactive in planning for potential crises by developing response strategies for different scenarios.
Threat assessment and prioritisation: Analyse the credibility and potential impact of dangerous narratives or threats by looking at sentiment, engagement and influencer involvement etc. This will allow you to respond quickly to make sure these risks don’t impact your reputation or bottom line.
Misinformation tracking: Monitor potential sources of misinformation or fake news related to your brand or the wider industry and respond to stop false or misleading narratives spreading so that you can protect your reputation and maintain trust.
Situational awareness and decision support: Get real-time alerts, dashboards and reports on potentially harmful narratives or threats so that you can keep an eye on the situation and make more informed decisions about when to respond and how.
To learn more about how SITech is evolving to tackle the increasing amount of dis- and misinformation on the internet, we spoke to one of the tech providers in this space, Cyabra.
Cyabra is leading the fight against disinformation. Founded by information warfare experts who were concerned by the spread of fake news, disinformation, and misinformation, harnessed by fake profiles to damage brands, individuals, and societies, we have made it ourmission to uncover the good, bad and fake online. Our clients span from the US State Department to Warner Media. Within the category of “Narrative and Threat Analysis”, Cyabra’s AI is the only solution that uncovers malicious actors, bot networks, and GenAI content. Brands and public sector agencies trust us to monitor, uncover, and mitigate against emerging crises and attacks on social media
Legacy social listening tools will continue to be a valuable and everyday tool for the listening community. However, from a brand disinformation perspective, you need a tool that can help identify fake profiles and the impact they have on the ‘real’ audiences across social media. For example, our AI algorithm uses hundreds of parameters to determine whether a profile is real or fake.
While in the past, fake news and disinformation have been a public sector problem - fake profiles were involved in social media conversations only when it came to elections, protests, or civil unrest - recent technological advancements have caused a huge shift in this field. Nowadays, with the ability to operate sophisticated bot networks and the utilization of GenAI by bad actors, fake profiles have expanded in volume and impact, and are able to appear authentic and credible. They harness social media platforms’ algorithms to increase their exposure, manipulate public opinion, and spread brand disinformation. They can be used by a competitor, a disgruntled customer, or anyone seeking to harm companies – even state actors who look to harm a country’s economy.
Social media and comms teams are experienced with crisis management on social media, but dealing with PR crises led by fake profiles is completely different, and requires a different set of tools and techniques. Nowadays, marketing, PR and communications teams are all regularly – and unknowingly – wasting time and money dealing with fake profiles.
Other social listening-related categories provide insights born largely out of mentions and sentiment. While crucial to any marketing and PR team, all of those categories address content, or what is being said. Tools in this category offer the ability to analyze the full range of the “ABC” of social media – actors, behavior, and content. . Analyzing the content alone may not provide a complete picture of attacks, threats, and PR crises occurring online. However, Cyabra and others in its field offer a more sophisticated method of understanding and analyzing social media, which helps protect brand reputation and mitigate potential financial losses. So, in addition to what is being said, social listening professionals can now understand the who; i.e. which social media accounts - fake or real - are actually driving the conversation.
“Disinformation” was a term used mostly to describe election interference, health disinfo, and other threats to social discourse. But with the introduction of sophisticated bot networks as well as the recent explosion of Generative AI tools, disinformation has shifted into the private sector, and is now widely used to attack companies, harm their reputation, and even manipulate their stock. Bad actors use GenAI to create unique profile pictures, a timeline of fake activity, and supporting fake content such as websites and magazines, making fake profiles indistinguishable from authentic ones. Launching a fake campaign is becoming increasingly easy and simple, as well as harder to spot.
Awareness of the problem is growing but is still in its early stages. Despite recent bot-led PR crises that caused huge damage to major brands such as Zara, Rip Curl, Amazon, and Netflix, the private sector still views those crises as separate random instances and not as part of the greater threat fake profiles pose to the private sector, to our society, and to the overall sense of trust in the online realm.
As the threat of brand disinformation continues to grow and expand, weaponizing social media platforms, the defensive social media market will continue to advance in tandem. Preventative technology, innovative analysis tools, and real-time alerts will become better, harnessing the power of AI to identify fake profiles and detect fake campaigns and other attacks. Sophisticated tools will be better able to detect GenAI images and texts, Deepfakes, and other manipulations and eventually become part of the mandatory arsenal for every PR and comms, as well as social media managers and marketing teams. In the distant future, those tools might even be adopted by the platforms themselves to detect and mitigate the risks.
We believe that within the social listening industry, a new ‘Brand Disinformation’ category is required to address the challenges described above.
As the threat of brand disinformation continues to grow and expand, weaponizing social media platforms, the defensive social media market will continue to advance in tandem.
