Macro analysis on the way brands are discussed and interact on social media networks. 718 million mentions across 347 brands.
Brandwatch image
Introduction, key learnings, and methodology
How can brand marketers navigate the social media world in 2025?
Well, it’s complicated.
Between many platforms, constantly shifting algorithms, and evolving consumer behavior, social media practitioners must also be analysts, trend researchers, data engineers, shape shifters, and mind readers. (We don’t have data on the last two, but we’re pretty sure they’re job requirements these days.)
The goal with our State of Social report is to uncomplicate things – to empower marketers and analysts with the benchmarks and data they need to cut through the noise, unearth the opportunities, and craft better strategies for 2025. In other words, make social media work hard for you without having to work harder yourself.
Key findings from the report
01 Share of voice
On average, brands initiate just a little over 1% (1.11%) of all discussions related to them.
02 Strong emotions
Tech brands get the highest percentage of angry mentions online, while entertainment brands elicit the most joy.
03 Generations
Baby boomers are more vocal than other generations about energy brands, while Gen Z and millennials dominate entertainment conversations.
04 Peak days
Wednesdays and Thursdays are peak days for mentions of brands, while Sundays are quietest.
05 And much more
Read on to find out what's driving the unique conversations around eight key industries.
Our methodology
We analyzed 718.6 million online mentions across eight industries and 347 brands from February 1 to July 31, 2024 using Brandwatch Consumer Research.
The eight industries we examined are:
- Automotive
- CPG
- Consumer tech
- Energy
- Entertainment
- Financial services
- Food
- Retail
We looked at 347 brand queries to get industry averages as well as generic industry queries to pull more industry-specific insights.
Brandwatch Benchmark was also used for content analysis and to pull in some social media benchmarking data across the eight selected industries.
Section 2
Social benchmarks
In this section we’ll explore social engagement benchmarks spanning eight industries across a variety of metrics. You’ll also find tips on how organizations can effectively use these insights to better engage with their audiences.
Please note: These benchmarks are industry averages based on a selected list of 347 brands, offering a solid starting point for analysis. We recommend that you conduct your own analysis to see how your brand fits among your specific competitor set.
Audience emotion and sentiment benchmarks
Emotion and sentiment analysis can help your organization assess public opinion about your brand, products, and services, as well as the content you share across your social channels. These metrics can essentially provide a “health check”, with emotion analysis looking at the specific emotions displayed in a post and sentiment analysis providing a broader look at the positive, negative, or neutral context of a post.
Which emotions do consumers express in brand-related discussions?
Looking at the emotion-categorized conversation broken down by industry, we see that:
01
Entertainment and retail brands elicit the happiest posts, with 56% and 54% of these mentions categorized as joyful, respectively.
02
Consumer tech brands accumulated the highest percentage of angry mentions, with 37% of mentions categorized as angry.
03
Food and CPG brands scored the highest share of mentions categorized as disgusted, accounting for 29% and 28%, respectively.
04
Energy brands amassed the highest portion of both sad and fearful mentions, accounting for 29% and 14% of their conversation, respectively.
Consumer sentiment across industries
Another way to check your brand health is through sentiment analysis.
Using sentiment analysis, posts are classified as having a positive, neutral, or negative context, allowing marketers to check perceptions of their brand, products, services, or industry over time.
Using sentiment analysis, we found
- Brands in the food and CPG industries gathered the highest share of negative mentions.
- Energy brands amassed the smallest share of positive mentions.
- The entertainment sector saw the lowest percentage of negativity compared to the other seven industries.
Pro tip
Diving deeper into what’s driving these trends in positivity and negativity can empower marketers to make informed decisions, fine-tune strategies, and address areas that may require reputation management or engagement improvements.
3 ways to leverage emotion analysis
1. Turning negative comments into opportunities
With social listening, brands can spot negative comments, problems, or concerns early on and deal with them proactively. Engaging with consumers where possible, learning more about their issues, and assisting them accordingly could help brands turn things around and keep negativity at bay.
Let’s look at these two examples.
If you’re Nintendo and see a post like "Let’s not be parents. Just give the kid a digital entertainment system," your social media marketing team can jump in and highlight features like parental controls.
Meanwhile, if Lenovo products are consistently associated with “zero work-life balance,” the brand can promote product features that better support a balanced lifestyle or share educational content to help their customers achieve it.
2. Gathering feedback for product development
Social media managers might not have direct control over the product flaws often pinpointed by consumers on social media, but they can ensure that feedback gets to the right place.
In the examples below, consumers discuss technical issues with apps and websites. By working closely with product teams, social media managers can help escalate urgent issues as well as common suggestions from customers, helping to build a more customer-centric product in the long run.
3. Amplifying positive feedback
By actively engaging with and celebrating the positive interactions your brand receives, you not only create more joy within your online community but also contribute to a more favorable perception of your brand in the eyes of your audience.
Take these wholesome stories for example.
Consumer-brand interactions by industry
For this section we chose to focus on the data from X.
How do consumers and brands interact on social media? The chart below illustrates the diverse ways in which brands and consumers interact on X across various industries.
Engagement levels vary across industries. Here’s a breakdown of the chart’s takeaways:
- Creating shareable content that drives retweets is a strength for brands in entertainment.
- Retail and CPG brands get tagged by consumers the most, offering an opportunity to create a lasting conversation and a path to learn more about consumer preferences and interests.
- Auto, food, and consumer tech brands saw the highest volume of replies to their posts, suggesting that the content they post resonates with consumers or at least elicits a reaction!
Perhaps most interestingly, brand-owned accounts, on average, are responsible for initiating just over 1% (1.11%) of the conversation about them. This number is even lower than last year's – 1.51%.
This data prompts an interesting question: Who truly shapes the narrative – brands or consumers?
With consumers leading most brand-related conversations, brands are left with limited proactive control. That’s why it’s crucial to actively listen and engage with consumers to remain relevant and ensure the narrative that exists is one the brand is happy with.
Industry audience breakdown by generation
We also looked at the generational breakdown of audiences within the eight selected industries.
This analysis was done using Social Panels for different generations across X and Reddit.
When examining the industry-wide data, we spotted the following insights:
- While millennials tend to make up the largest chunk of conversations around these industries, there are anomalies to be found, and brands can measure their own breakdown to see how they compare.
- Baby boomers represented the smallest audience in conversations about consumer tech, accounting for 6.4% of the entire conversation.
- Baby boomers had the largest percentage contribution in conversations about energy.
- Gen Z had higher representation in conversations about entertainment and consumer tech than other industries.
One way to interpret this data is that industries better set up to lean into ‘Gen Z speak’ (like tech and entertainment) can generate more engagement from this audience. For regulated industries with more formal agreements with customers (like energy) this can be more of a challenge.
Pro tip for marketers
Understanding and benchmarking generational trends in brand discussions across sectors is key. It shows where brands can adjust their marketing strategies to better reach specific age groups.
Best days to post by industry
We analyzed social media data to discover the best days for brands to join and engage in social media conversations by industry.
The best days were determined by the volume of industry-specific posts across days of the week, with higher volumes indicating more opportunities for engagement.
When is your audience the most engaged online?
Sunday was the quietest day for conversation around our eight industries.
Meanwhile, Wednesday had the highest volume of mentions and Thursday was very close behind.
01
On average, brands spanning our eight industries see more social media mentions on Wednesdays and Thursdays.
02
Brands in the entertainment and energy sectors amassed the highest share of brand-related conversation on Fridays, standing out from the rest of the industries analyzed here.
03
For the automotive, financial, and food industries, Thursdays generate more social mentions.
Section 3
Industry spotlights
In this section, we’ll look closely at each industry, revealing valuable insights specific to each market.
We also uncover key takeaways marketers can use to inform their social strategy.