Talkwalker Blog

Most online coverage of the FIFA World Cup 2026 is busy predicting a winner. That story is tempting, but it’s also impossible to call. The more useful question for marketers is playing out off the pitch: which brands are winning the conversation, and which ones are getting dragged into it?

When it comes to consumer insights, surveys and panels are excellent at validating known behaviors. They’re also slow, episodic, retrospective, susceptible to several types of bias, and their sample size is often limited by your budget. Social listening, on the other hand, offers continuous access to unprompted, spontaneous behavior and opinions at scale.

If you want to know what AI tools are saying about your company, you need to understand how to track brand mentions in AI search. From product comparisons to recommendation lists, AI answers are shaping your brand narrative before buyers ever reach your website. Brand mentions in AI search are how your company appears inside an AI-generated answer.

Super Bowl LX was more than a championship game. It was a cultural moment where sports, entertainment, and brand storytelling competed for the attention of a global audience. And the way people responded across social networks offers clear lessons for marketers and analysts. In this post, we break down the social listening data to show what actually drove attention, what sparked the strongest reactions, and which brands came out ahead.

There was a time that Google rankings were the ultimate prize in search. A top spot for the right keywords was a sure way to connect with everyone looking for what your brand has to offer. But search behavior is changing. TikTok, Instagram, and Reddit are known discovery engines for Gen Z and younger. But people of all ages are using social search, especially for brand discovery. Nearly three-quarters (72.9%) of people worldwide use social media sites to research brands.

There are approximately 5.4 billionsocial media users as of 2025. For comparison, there are approximately 6 billion people over the age of 15 in the entire world. In other words, almost all adults (and most teenagers) are using social media. And they’re using it a lot. An average of 141 minutes a day in 2025, down from a peak of 151 minutes in 2023. During the 857 hours they spend on social media every year, people post a lot of personal information. They share locations.

Marketers and insights teams have access to more data than ever before — and traditional analytics tools and overworked teams are having trouble keeping up. Knowing how to use AI agents helps teams leverage all their data, with actionable insights in minutes instead of months. Key takeaways AI agents are far more sophisticated than traditional AI tools. They use autonomous reasoning to perform deep, multi-step analysis. They even recommend specific next steps.

For brands in fashion and beyond, Fashion Week is about much more than current trends — it’s a global marketing case study. Online conversations reveal how celebrity appearances, viral moments, and cultural controversies can instantly boost the visibility of fashion labels. The same dynamics extend to every industry. A strategic partnership, a bold creative move, or an unexpected news hook can generate engagement overnight — and shift sentiment in ways that matter for business outcomes.

Audience analysis uses metrics and data to create a picture of who your audience is, what they’re like, and how you can best connect to them as a brand. While the data can be very granular, you will also uncover big-picture insights that allow you to craft your strategy around your audience. It keeps you focused on the group of people who actually buy and use your products, rather than your own internal perceptions of what’s important. It’s a simple switch in perspective.