๐Ÿ“Š Competitive Analysis with Brand24 | AI Powered Social Listening | Humanitarians AI Fellows

A Brand24 project tracking Coca-Cola against Pepsi shows how AI sentiment analysis, source breakdowns, and comparison tools turn raw brand mentions into a usable competitive analysis.

10:54 video4 min readWatch on YouTube

Knowing that people are talking about your brand online is easy. Knowing whether that conversation is helping or hurting you, and what your competitor's version of the same conversation looks like, is a different and much harder problem. This tutorial walks through Brand24, a social listening and analytics tool, using a real project built around Coca-Cola and Pepsi to show what that harder problem actually looks like once AI is doing the sorting.

What Brand24 actually does

Brand24 is a website that performs social listening and monitoring, providing insight into brand mentions and online reputation. Its AI connection isn't incidental: it uses AI-powered sentiment analysis to categorize each mention as positive, neutral, or negative, applies natural language processing to make sense of large volumes of text across social media, blogs, forums, and other platforms, and uses AI algorithms to filter and prioritize which mentions actually matter, so a brand's attention goes to actionable data rather than noise.

Setting up a project

Getting started follows a familiar pattern: sign up, with a 15-day free trial before any pricing kicks in, then set up a project by entering the keywords and key phrases you want tracked. In the demo, that means entering the target brand's name and common variants, "Coca-Cola" and "Coke," alongside a direct competitor, "Pepsi," plus a related hashtag. You also choose which languages to track mentions in, English in this case, before creating the project and landing on the dashboard.

Reading the dashboard

Once a project exists, the dashboard organizes everything into a set of distinct sections: a mentions summary, AI insights, deeper analysis, an AI brand assistant, topic analysis, a comparison view, sources, and influencers. The mentions and reach graph is the first thing worth understanding, since it can be filtered by day, week, or month to show how a brand's presence has trended over time, including growth and decline. Below that, individual mentions are broken out by source, Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, news outlets, podcasts, forums, and blogs, each mention showing where and when it happened and whether it read as a positive or negative brand moment. One example surfaced in the demo: a mention that Coca-Cola had gifted a commemorative bottle in a political context, illustrating how specific and current these captured mentions can be. The negative sentiment view narrows the same data down to just the mentions read as negative, pulling in examples from platforms like YouTube, Quora, and Reddit, which is exactly where most brands want to focus first when trying to understand where they're losing ground.

What the AI insights section adds

The summary section gives an overall count of mentions, reach, and interactions, split between positive and negative sentiment and filterable by the same date ranges. The AI insights section goes further, generating a written narrative interpretation of the brand's current standing, its cultural impact, and recent trends, not just raw counts. One concrete figure surfaced in the demo shows the kind of scale this tool is built to track: a substantial increase in overall mentions from 917 in a previous period to 37.9 thousand in the current one. That kind of jump is exactly the sort of signal a SWOT analysis needs, and Brand24 pairs the observation with generated recommendations, in this case suggesting a targeted marketing campaign built around a brand's connection to a seasonal moment like the holidays, based on a spike in mentions during that period.

Comparison as the actual competitive step

The analysis section goes deeper still, surfacing which public profiles are driving the most mentions and reach for a brand. But the feature that makes this a genuinely competitive tool, rather than just a monitoring one, is the comparison page, where a brand can be set directly against a competitor, Coca-Cola against Pepsi in this case, to see side by side how each is performing and where one is pulling ahead.

What this adds up to

Across the whole walkthrough, a few consistent lessons emerge about what actually drives brand performance in this kind of analysis: using high-impact hashtags effectively, collaborating with influencers for engagement that reads as authentic rather than paid, staying attached to trending topics, and understanding sentiment in enough depth to know not just how many mentions exist but how people feel about them. The broader case for a tool like this rests on three things: it builds brand awareness and visibility, it surfaces genuine customer insight into how a brand is actually being talked about, and it gives real competitive intelligence, the ability to monitor a rival's campaigns and strategies directly rather than guessing at them.

Key takeaways

  • Brand24 combines AI sentiment analysis and NLP to sort large volumes of social, blog, and forum mentions into positive, neutral, and negative categories.
  • A project is set up around specific keywords and competitor names, with a 15-day free trial before paid pricing applies.
  • The dashboard's mentions, sources, and sentiment breakdowns let you trace exactly where and how a brand is being discussed across platforms.
  • AI-generated insights translate raw mention counts into written analysis and specific marketing recommendations tied to real spikes in activity.
  • The comparison feature is what turns the tool from brand monitoring into genuine competitive analysis, setting your brand's data directly against a named competitor.

Who this is for

This tutorial is aimed at anyone doing brand monitoring or competitive analysis for the first time, whether for an established company or a new startup trying to understand its market position. It comes out of the Humanitarians AI Fellows "Learn AI by Teaching AI" initiative, where fellows build tutorials like this one as part of developing their own skills while sharing practical, tool-specific guidance with others; a companion project guide is linked in the video's description for anyone who wants to follow along step by step.

Full transcript(auto-generated, with timestamps)

[0:02]Good morning all. Today we'll be discussing about brand 24 which is a social media monitoring and analytics tool which uses AI as well as machine learning to provide insights into brands. So what is brand 24? So it's a website where it does social listening and it also does monitoring and it provides insights into brand mentions and online reputation. If you ask how it is related to AI, it is that brand 24 um it uses AI powered sentiment analysis to categorize mentions as positive, neutral or negative. It also uses NLP techniques to analyze large amounts of text data across social media, blogs, forums and other platforms.

[0:54]And also it uses AI algorithms to filter and prioritize relevant mentions ensuring that you know the brand is focusing on actionable data. So this GitHub report gives you a whole brief of how Brand 24 works and how you can use for competitive analysis. And without any further ado, let's move on to how Brand 24 works. So as any website you can login and once you log in uh you can sign up for free as well and once you sign up you get a 15-day free trial after which the pricing depends which we can move on to the last part. Now once you sign up you'll have a

[1:48]Popup which will ask you to enter keywords or key phrases. So this is where you have to enter which brand you want to monitor. So this is basically used by companies to like analyze their positive and negative mentions. So I want to for example analyze the brand Coca-Cola. So I can enter keywords and hashtags and I'm going to say Coca-Cola and then I'm going to say Coke. I'm going to say um I also want to you can also enter the competitive brands as well so that you can see how that brand is working. So I'm also going to enter Pepsi and I'm also going to enter um let's say

[2:40]Hashtag cocoa and so on and so forth. So next now I want to track and mentions of mentions are when the particular brand is mentioned in a post on a website or a blog. So is it all languages or how so? So so currently I'm just going to choose English and I'm going to create project. So once I create a project. Yes. So this is how your dashboard will look like once I create the project. So the mentions as you can see on the left side you have mentions summary AI insights analysis and AI brand assistant topic analysis comparison sources influencers. Now if you see the main and important

[3:41]Thing right now that shows is depending on the days what are the mentions in reach how has it been since 17th December to 16th of Jan what the analysis looks like. So in the mentions and reach like I said from 17 Jan December to 16th Jan how has it been? What is this? This is a graph that you can filter by date, weeks, months to understand how the brand has been per performing, how the growth has been. Was there a decline? was there. This is basically the number of mentions and you can see how many reaches were there and the sources if you can see

[4:32]Right here it is based on Facebook, Instagram, X, Tik Tok videos, news, podcast, forums, blogs and multiple. As you scroll down, you can see that how they were mentioned and where they were mentioned. For example, in this particular, it was mentioned that elsewhere in Washington, the Coca-Cola company gifted Trump a special common bottle, etc., etc. So it gives you a deep analysis of where and when the particular brand was mentioned and was it a positive brand um mention or a negative mention and so on so forth. So like for example I can see depending on weeks how it has been like this has been the mention in the

[5:26]Reach were there like I said mentioned about sentiment analysis before was it a negative I want to see about all the negative comments that was reached and this is all the negative comments and website was mentioned on on YouTube on Kora on Reddit the brand was mentioned as a negative So most brands want to understand and analyze where they went wrong and how they can improve. So brands 24 is an amazing website where you can do this. Helps you give you a deep insight and analysis of the brand that you choose. Now if I go to the summary section in the summary section it tells you

[6:11]Gives you a whole gist about the brand that you have selected. So, how many mentions were there and how how many reaches interactions, how many were positive sentiments, how many were negative sentiments, so on and so forth. Here again, you can filter it by date, by months, by weeks. And here what who which public profiles mentioned it and mentioned it the most and whose were the profiles that helped um reach the brand get a better reach for the brand and particular stats and everything is present in the summary section. the AI insights. What this is is it gives you a whole insight on what the summary is

[7:03]Telling you about. So the summary is basically submitted in the insight section and it gives you it is AI generates a whole new section for you where it tells you about Coca-Cola's um you know how the impact has been how the diversity has been and cultural impact and it gives you how the trends has been. So see it says substantial increase in overall mentions from 917 in the previous period to uh 37.9K in the current period. So you might ask how this is um usable. So it helps companies have a proper SWAT analysis for them. They can perform SWAT analysis based on these AI insights generated and then

[7:53]Understand and analyze where they can do better and how they can do better. It tells you about all the positive and negative uh in um sentiments as well and it recommends the brand but based on what the insights generated it recommends it gives you recommendations. So for example, the first recommendation is asking you to develop targeted marketing campaigns that further strengthen Coca-Cola connection to holiday celebrations based on sex scene during the Christmas and New Year period and gives you a whole recommendation for it. The analysis section is again more indepth. It tells you mentions from public profiles and who mentioned who are the which are the most popular

[8:40]Mentions and uh it gives you an overview of everything in depth. You can com there is in the comparison page I would say that's where you can compare your brand to another brand and you can see and understand how it is helpful. So as you can see Brans 24 is a great web for analysis. So if you ask me what are the key takeaways that uh brand 24 helped me understand about Coca-Cola is that you know it helps utilize high impact hashtags. It collaborates with influencers for authentic engagement. It focuses on trending topics. It gives you a indepth analysis of the sentiments that are related to the mentions whether

[9:33]It reverse positive negative. It gives you recommendations and more. So why use brand 24? Initially the first and major point is it creates brand awareness and visibility and then it gives you customer insights. It tells you how the customer is using the brand or how the brand is being portrayed by the customer and it gives you competitive intelligence. It helps you monitor competitive strategies, analyze the competitors campaigns to identify. So even in this in the project you can choose for example Coca-Cola can go and choose Pepsi and then analyze their brand and how they are doing and based on the AI recommendations given there they can perform use those and

[10:21]Understand how they Coca-Cola can do better. This is not just about one brand. Any brand, even if you are starting up a new company or you're doing a startup and you're settled, you can do an analysis of your brand, your company here to understand how you can do better and what can help you. So this is all about brands 24. This is a brief about it and um there is a guide in the repo which you can find in the description below. Thank you.

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