January 21, 2025

Audience Intelligence by Bodyguard: A revolution in audience understanding

By The Bodyguard Team

Social media is no longer just a platform for connection—it’s a critical space where brands and businesses build and maintain their reputation, engage with audiences, and shape consumer perceptions.

With millions of followers and hundreds of thousands of interactions every day, social media channels are a goldmine of information just waiting to be tapped into. Every like, comment, and share gives real-time insights into how your audience feels about your brand, products and service, at any given time.

Whether you’re a luxury fashion house, major sports team, global gaming platform or international media outlet, taking the pulse of your audience gives an unparalleled view of the likes, dislikes, opinions, sentiment and perception of your audience. And what business wouldn’t want that kind of detail?

Audience interactions on social media are a goldmine of information, straight from the mouths of your potential customers. The problem lies in the sheer volume of online interactions, which make it challenging for businesses to keep up with what the audience is saying, and even harder to extract value from it. Manually sifting through these interactions and identifying trends is virtually impossible.

That’s why we created Audience Intelligence.

What is Audience Intelligence?

Audience Intelligence is Bodyguard's revolutionary product feature that puts you at the heart of your audience conversations. Our audience analysis tool gives you a birds-eye view of what’s being said by your audience, about your brand, on your social platforms at any moment.

It’s a transformative way to understand and respond to your audience behavior. With these insights, businesses are equipped to meet and even exceed audience expectations, delivering exactly what their audience wants, as well as identifying areas for improvement.

There's no more guess work. No more poor business decisions. No more hoping your latest campaign, product, signing or show is a hit with your audience.

Instead, Audience Intelligence shows you, in black and white, how your audience feels about almost anything your business is doing, at any time.

Audience Intelligence feature updates

Soon after launching Audience Intelligence, we asked our users what they'd like the feature to do next; and their answers have guided our product updates.

Based on this feedback, we've added powerful new features to Audience Intelligence to take it to the next level.

Ask your own question: Ask custom questions that are totally unique to your organization, and get straight to the heart of what your audience is thinking on any topic related to your business.
New pre-defined question: We've expanded the number of questions available in Audience Intelligence to include "What is the most commonly asked question by my audience?" In just one click, you can see the most asked question by people mentioning or interacting with your brand. You can use this insight to improve the customer experience and remove barriers to purchase by giving your audience the information they're looking for, without them having to ask.
Enhanced keyword search: Our search by keyword on messages, authors and posts pages lets you combine keywords and phrases using logical operators to refine your results.

Search for individual words to search our database by keyword, or use phrases to search for an exact sequence of words.

Either way, your search will return targeted, relevant results that give you the insights you're looking for.

Why businesses need a helping hand

For businesses with a strong online presence, every interaction counts. A single viral comment or trending hashtag can influence public perception for better or worse.

Data from social media interactions can be hugely valuable, but most businesses struggle to:

Identify key audience sentiment (particularly in real-time).
Distinguish actionable insights from the noise of social media chatter.
Understand the broader context behind audience reactions.

Traditional moderation tools often stop at removing harmful content, without providing a comprehensive view of what’s driving audience behavior. And while some social listening tools provide audience sentiment percentages and word clouds, they lack the nuance and depth of insight to be truly valuable.

This gap leaves brands vulnerable to crises, missed opportunities, and lower engagement.

Unparalleled insights in seconds

Audience Intelligence bridges the gap between audience analysis and understanding. By using generative-AI, it produces powerful audience insights which remove the need to sift through huge amounts of raw data yourself.

Instead, users can access reliable, refined, real-time data they can trust.

Ready to find out just what it can do? Let’s dive in!

Audience Intelligence lets you ask a number of pre-defined questions, which have been carefully tailored to align with the demands of your industry. In a few clicks, you can gather key insights into your online community, including:

The trending topics that your audience is talking about.
The people that your audience is mentioning in association with your brand.
The products your audience are talking about the most.
The mood of your audience with subjects that are positively and negatively mentioned.
The most commonly asked questions by your audience.

And for even more specific insights, we’ve made it possible to ask your own personalized questions to find the answers to questions that are unique to your business.

Top five audience insights revealed by Audience Intelligence

1. The conversations that matter most

Rather than just knowing who your audience is, the real value lies in understanding what they’re talking about. Audience Intelligence uncovers the key conversations shaping your community — from trending topics to recurring concerns. These audience insights reveal not only what captures attention but also what drives engagement, loyalty, or criticism, so you can respond with relevance and clarity.

2. What your audience cares about

Audiences are constantly telling you their priorities in their comments, posts, and shares. Audience Intelligence picks up on the topics, themes, and values that matter most to them, from sustainability and inclusivity to price and product quality. This lets you align your messaging and product strategy with what truly drives your customers.

3. How they feel about your brand (and why)

Sentiment matters, but raw “positive” or “negative” labels aren’t enough. Audience Intelligence digs deeper into why people feel the way they do.

Is your audience frustrated with customer service response times? Excited about your latest product? Concerned about your environmental impact? These insights let you take precise action to strengthen relationships and address pain points before they escalate.

4. Where emerging risks and opportunities are

Online conversations shift quickly. Audience Intelligence reveals early signs of potential crises, like a negative hashtag gaining traction, as well as emerging opportunities, such as an influencer organically championing your brand. Spotting these changes in real time helps you act fast, so you can mitigate risk or capitalize on momentum.

5. How you stack up against your competitors

It’s not enough to know your own audience — you need to know how they compare to your competitors’ communities. Audience Intelligence surfaces how customers perceive your brand versus others: what makes you stand out, where you’re falling behind, and where you can differentiate. That context is invaluable for building smarter positioning and gaining market share.

Why these insights matter, and what you can do with them

Each of these audience insights works together to give brands a complete picture of their audience. This isn't just numbers on a dashboard anymore. It's a living, breathing community. With this knowledge, you can:

Build stronger brand loyalty
Create more relevant content
Prevent small issues from becoming crises
Discover untapped growth opportunities

A roadmap for better business decisions: Proven use cases for every industry

Audience Intelligence isn’t just nice-to-have information: it’s a roadmap for better business decisions.

For brands, Audience Intelligence can help shape product development, marketing campaigns, customer experience and more.

Users can ask one of a number of pre-defined questions to see the trending topics, people mentioned, most talked about products, general mood, and commonly asked questions by your audience.

In seconds, you can find out what your audience loves and hates about your brand, marketing campaigns, ambassadors, products and customer service. This isn’t speculation; it’s crystal clear conversations that shine a spotlight on everything you’re doing right, and the parts you’re getting wrong. And when used together with our Campaign Management feature, users can gauge audience opinion across entire social media campaigns.

In the world of sports, Audience Intelligence gives insights on what people are saying about your performance at both club and individual level, as well as your players, staff, transfers, new signings and sponsors.

Searching for an individual by name, whether they're a player, coach or staff, will instantly return trending topics and key conversations around that person, so you can identify risks to reputation and revenue, or opportunities for communication.

Global media outlets can use Audience Intelligence to gain vital insights during major events, and for series, presenters and one-off shows. Searching by keyword will return audience opinions, associated people and subjects, and overall sentiment.

For gaming platforms, Audience Intelligence can be used to shape product development. Use these insights to make game updates and create new versions in line with audience demand.

Studios can also get audience feedback on business areas, including pricing and improvements, and track new requests as they happen.