GPT and Brandwatch: what does AI technology mean for the future of social listening?

What’s new in Brandwatch?

This year, Brandwatch has steadily been releasing a new integration with GPT with the intention of adding more power to their social listening tools. As the first company to provide an AI search of online data, it is well-placed to bulk up their offering with new insights. We’ve been working with a beta version of the new tool, which is now available on the wider platform.

What does GPT offer in Brandwatch?

  • Conversation insights – removing the need to sift manually through mentions, GPT will be able to summarise themes from a dataset of raw content very quickly
  • Writing assistant – from spelling and grammar corrections, through to copy suggestions based on user inputs
  • Content insights – quantitative insights on how your content, or that of your competitors, is performing

How is the new tool faring?

Having been using the beta version of the new AI tool, we’ve found that it offers some great benefits.

Firstly, we can now dig both deeper and more broadly into issues that audiences are talking about. Brandwatch has always offered comprehensive samples of social mentions, but now GPT is able to summarise huge tranches of them, and sum up what they have to say. 

GPT insights in Brandwatch

This has real-world benefits. Recently, we noticed that conversations around climate change had increased significantly week-on-week. We ran some adverts around climate change, and they performed well while that topic was trending, gaining a ROAS of 5:1.

Secondly, we can now uncover popular phrases and phrasing regarding certain topics. Take, for instance, the earthquake in Turkey and Syria in early 2023. If online audiences are calling it the Turkey-Syria earthquake, rather than Syria-Turkey earthquake, then we can use that more popular phrasing in adverts to improve audience recognition of the issue.

What does this mean for the future of social listening?

At its most basic level, the integration of GPT with Brandwatch will make social listening much easier and more effective. It means no more manual scrolling through huge volumes of mentions to find trending topics, and a more effective way of tracking popular phrases. We’ve already been able to use it in real campaigns to improve performance.

Six months on, how Facebook’s new targeting restriction’s are working.

Earlier this year, we outlined how Facebook’s new targeting restrictions could affect the ability to find customers in Ads Manager. Six months on, how are the new restrictions working, and how can advertisers now find their audience?

What targeting has been removed?

In midwinter 2022, Facebook removed the ability to target users by anything that could be interpreted as sensitive, including:

  • Religion
  • Health
  • Race or ethnicity
  • Political affiliation
  • Sexual orientation

This has made targeting users during religious festivals, or for political and social campaigns, much trickier than it used to be.

What options are available?

Broad targeting, Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences are still available, although the last two rely on having a good database of customers ready to upload to Audiences.

Facebook has also introduced Advantage Lookalike, where adverts may be shown to more people than the standard 1-10% threshold if it is likely to improve performance.

How can advertisers target users?

Here are some of the techniques we’ve been using to replace interest targeting: 

Location targeting

target by location to try to narrow down your audience. If your adverts are aimed primarily at Catholics, for instance, target locations where Catholics make up a good proportion of the population. A quick Google search can provide this information. Similarly, if you are running ads for Pride month, it makes sense to target cities hosting Pride events, particularly around the time that those events are running.

Icons and popular entertainment

While many targeting options have been removed, celebrities, artists and entertainment choices remain in place. If you can find a way to use broad brush strokes then you can identify an audience by its affiliations. The films of John Waters, or Arabic Pop Music, or the satire of Jon Stewart – all are more likely to be enjoyed by sections of the population you are otherwise unable to target.

Combination targeting

While specific targeting may be off the table – women’s rights, for instance, or feminism – you can use combination targeting to get as close to the interest as possible. Let’s say you wanted to run pro-choice adverts. Targeting users interested in Planned Parenthood or Women’s Health is no longer possible. But if you target women in Democrat-leaning states, or in locations where abortion is set to stay available, and then combine that with an interest in human rights, pregnancy and feminist icons like Simone de Beauvoir, then you might get close to targeting exactly who you want.

There is no doubt that Facebook’s new targeting restrictions have made it harder to specify an audience, particularly if you are running a religious, political or social campaign. Facebook is always refreshing the way it works, although these changes look set to stay. However, with a bit of creativity or a good customer database, it is still possible to find an audience who will engage with your campaign.

Facebook’s new targeting restrictions: what does it mean for advertisers?

In Autumn 2021, Facebook announced significant changes to the way advertisers can target prospective customers in Ads Manager. These changes came into effect in mid-January 2022, and have reduced the possibilities for advertisers looking to expand their current audience.

So what are the changes, how are advertisers affected and what are the options for future targeting?

What will be affected?

Facebook has clamped down on any targeting that could be interpreted as sensitive. Topics viewed as such include:

  • Religion
  • Health
  • Race or ethnicity
  • Political affiliation
  • Sexual orientation

This doesn’t just apply to specific interest targeting, but also any events, figures or organisations relating to that topic.

For instance, if you wanted to target Catholics, prior to 19th January Catholic Church was available as a targeting interest. Now, not only is that keyword unavailable, but so too is Pope Francis, The Bible and Baptism.

Feminism, as another example, is also off the table, along with associated terms such as Women’s Rights, Hilary Clinton and Planned Parenthood.

What targeting remains available?

This is clearly a big hit for organisations hoping to target people with quite specific – albeit supposedly sensitive – interests. So what is left for advertisers to target?

  • Broad targeting remains in place. Advertisers can still find prospective customers by gender, age, language and location.
  • Custom Audiences, uploaded from an advertiser’s own data, or gathered from website or app traffic or engagement on Facebook, is unaffected.
  • Lookalike Audiences also remain available to use, as they are based on Custom Audiences.

What are the options for advertisers?

As things stand, here are the options for advertisers:

  1. Follow Facebook recommendations for existing audiences. If an advertiser already had an audience up and running as of 19th January, it will continue to run until 17th March. It may need to be updated with recommendations from Facebook, although it is now clear yet what those recommendations will be.
  2. Set up a broad targeting audience – by age, gender, location and language – and allow Facebook’s algorithms to do the rest. Again, it is not clear how Facebook will find the correct audience for broadly targeted ads, but it supposedly tracks the language used in the advert to allocate interests.
  3. Do as much analysis on your own Custom Audiences as possible. Sort your data by campaign, date, or any other information available to make your Custom Audiences as specific as they can be.
  4. Find some workarounds. A few years ago, Facebook removed the ability to target Muslims through specific keywords like Islam or Muslim. However, terms such as Ramadan and Eid were still available, allowing advertisers interested in a Muslim audience to target them reasonably well. Similarly, while Feminism and Women’s Rights are now excluded, lower-profile feminists like Simone de Beauvoir are still available.

Facebook are always updating and amending how Ads Manager works, so who knows how long the current restrictions will stay as they are. It may be that, if results suffer, advertisers are drawn away from Facebook, forcing a backtracking or alteration to this new regime. We’ll be monitoring the changes closely and seeing how they effect the targeting we do for fundraising campaigns, stay tuned for updates on this over the coming months.