Analyzing 500 Million Conversations

Happy Thursday, Collaborators:

A special welcome to our 133 new subscribers this week! 

Thank you all so much for your support. We’re looking forward to unpacking how the top companies use AI with you. 

This week, we’ll discover how a startup experienced breakneck growth by incorporating AI into its most important work. 

Let’s get into it. 

-Mariah

The millennial confusion about Gen Z trends in this email was entirely written by humans.

The Brand: Social (First) Media

Do you want to listen to the day’s news while putting on makeup with the newscaster? 

If you’re over 25, that sentence may not make much sense. But “get ready with me” videos are one of the most popular new shows for The News Movement. 

The News Movement – or TNM – is a Generation Z-focused media startup based in the US and UK. TNM designs its stories for and publishes most of its content on social media. 

“We started with a hypothesis - that a different style of content creation would help many millions of people be better informed and take the action they want.” says TNM. “The data from our millions of views and growing number of followers shows the hypothesis works.” 

The company has grown at a breakneck pace, from launching publicly in late 2022 to partnering with the Associated Press to provide content. 

The Challenge: News Avoidance

The News Movement’s growth comes from solving a problem that stymied established media giants. 

Americans’ trust in traditional media has plummeted in the past 20 years. Television news is now the least trusted institution in the country - except for Congress. 

Britons bring their own challenges for the media industry. Selective news avoidance, or reducing news intake, has doubled in the UK from 2017 to 2022. Now, 46% of Britons limit their news consumption, in part to reduce the negative impact of news on their moods. 

The falling trust in traditional media includes Gen Z consumers. According to Reuters, 78% of 18 to 24-year-olds prefer to get their news through “side doors” like social media, search engines, and aggregators instead of traditional channels. 

The News Movement publishes news on social media to approach younger consumers where they are. 

However, their chosen medium requires constant change to adapt to the latest trends. 

“If you don’t understand your audience, who are socially native, who are the next generation of consumers, you’re going to struggle to engage them.” said Kamal Ahmed, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The News Movement. “And that’s a really important part of our model and an important part of not only our editorial approach but also our commercial approach.” 

Analyzing and acting on social data is key to TNM’s success–and survival. 

The Solution: Social Listening

The key to TNM’s success on social media is social listening: monitoring content about their brand and content pillars. The News Movement uses social listening to identify emerging trends, audience sentiment, and popular content, and create content that resonates. 

TNM worked with Sprinklr’s Unified-CXM (Customer Experience Management) platform to build out their social listening process. The platform gathers customer data from 30+ channels, and operates across different markets and languages. The Unified-CXM’s Social Listening tool taps into 500 million social media conversations per day. 

Sprinklr uses AI to analyze all that unstructured data and draw out key insights on how and when to communicate with customers.  

Setting Up Social Listening

TNM’s team worked with Sprinklr to set up their AI-enabled social listening process: 

1. First, they built queries around TNM’s editorial topics to track reader sentiment around different news stories on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter/X. 

2. They identified leading creators to follow and “listen to.” 

3. Finally, the team built out dashboards. The dashboards gave them a bird’s eye view of the best-performing content and editorial topics, and simplified reporting. 

TNM also implemented Sprinklr’s social media scheduling tool to post content across multiple channels. The company’s ultimate goal is to allow journalists to post their own content from Sprinklr so the journalists can build their own personal brands with oversight from TNM. 

The Results

Unified-CXM saves the TNM team at least 3-4 hours per week. 

“If we have a big story coming out, we want to know, ‘How are people talking about the topic that story is about? What is the general sentiment of that topic on the social platform we’re targeting?’” said Valentina Park, TNM’s Head of Audience. “Having that context is critical.” 

The insights have played a key role in TNM’s explosive growth. 

The startup has racked up over 1.7 billion views and 1.1 million followers on its brands from organic growth–and it launched in 2022.

The Takeaway

The News Movement knew that real-time, extensively researched insights on content would be crucial to win in social media news. However, no human team could analyze 500 million conversations per day on their own. AI fills in that gap, allowing the humans to focus on delivering journalistic rigor. 

Want to achieve your own transformational results with AI?

Ignore the latest growth hack. Instead, focus on the unique ways AI can benefit your core business–or even make your business possible.