The Future of Social Media and Brand Monitoring: Why Pendulum is a Game Changer – Part 1

Your Brand’s Reputation is Shaped Outside Twitter (X)

Your brand’s reputation is no longer being shaped solely by text-based platforms like Twitter (X) and legacy news sources. Today, video, audio, and image-based platforms dominate the digital landscape.

Consider this: YouTube has an estimated 2.5 billion monthly active users—nearly 7 times Twitter's 370 million (X). Research from Pew consistently shows that significantly more U.S. adults use platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok than Twitter (X). Yet, despite these shifting trends, nearly every major social media monitoring company still relies on Twitter (X) as its primary data source.

This gap leaves brands flying blind about how they’re discussed on the platforms that actually shape public perception. Pendulum is the first social listening and intelligence tool designed to bridge this gap—offering deep insights into video, audio, and image-based conversations.

In this 5-part series, we’ll explain why it’s critical to track your brand’s mentions and narratives across visual and audio platforms and how Pendulum makes it possible.

The Origins of Pendulum

The idea for Pendulum took root five years ago when co-founder and chief scientist Sam Clark was searching for answers to what he assumed were basic questions about the scale of political and conspiracy content on YouTube.

Having published numerous papers on machine learning methods for tracking content on Twitter during his time at the University of Washington (“Named Entity Recognition in Tweets: An Experimental Study“ and “Open domain event extraction from Twitter”), Clark was familiar with the methodologies available for monitoring text-based platforms. However, he was surprised at the lack of tools for conducting large-scale, systematic analyses of YouTube content—even though YouTube had already surpassed Twitter in reach and influence.

What started as an academic challenge soon led to the development of cutting-edge approaches for accurately tracking content across YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and other major platforms. 

The result? A world-class Artificial Intelligence tool that empowers brands and organizations to truly understand their presence in the real digital landscape.

Key Questions This Blog Series Will Answer

1. Why should I track brand mentions and narratives on video, audio, and image platforms?

Influential mentions of your brand receive over 4 times as many impressions across YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram as on Twitter (X). If you’re not tracking these platforms, you’re missing the majority of the conversation about your brand.

2. Why do brands need to analyze more than just titles and descriptions?

Some of the social listening and intelligence companies that claim to support video and audio platforms are limited to title and description matches—but that barely scratches the surface. To truly understand how your brand is being discussed, you need to analyze video transcripts, image contents, and audio dialogue. This is one of the key places Pendulum Intelligence sets itself apart.

3. How does Pendulum even get this data?

Monitoring video and audio platforms at scale is a complex challenge. Unlike Twitter (X) and legacy news sources, APIs don’t exist to easily query all mentions of your brand. In this series, we’ll explain how Pendulum leverages its proprietary AI-driven methods to discover valuable and hard-to-find brand and topic mentions on these important platforms.

4. Isn’t Twitter (X) representative of all these other platforms anyway?

Not at all. Each platform has fundamentally different types of content, user behavior, and engagement patterns. What trends on Twitter (X) may have no traction on YouTube or TikTok—and vice versa. Treating Twitter as a stand-in for all social media is a critical mistake.

5. How do you handle the noise from these new data sources?

Monitoring visual and audio content introduces a massive amount of data, but not all of it is relevant. Pendulum Intelligence goes beyond Boolean keywords and applies advanced AI-based filtering techniques to cut through the noise and identify the brand and topic mentions that matter to you.

What’s Next in This Brand Monitoring Series?

Tracking brand mentions beyond Twitter (X) is just the beginning. In Part 2, Your Brand’s Reputation Isn’t Shaped on Twitter (X), we’ll dive deeper into why analyzing only titles and descriptions isn’t enough—and how Pendulum Intelligence uncovers hidden brand narratives within video, audio, and images. Stay tuned to learn how AI-driven transcript analysis, image recognition, and audio processing provide a true picture of your brand’s presence across digital platforms.

Want to see how Pendulum can transform your brand monitoring strategy? Request a demo today and discover how our AI-powered platform helps you stay ahead of the conversation.

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