Pulsar in the media

FT analysis of X found 17% of Burnham’s posts this year were about football. Pulsar’s audience intelligence adds the layer that matters: around 15% of his northern followers are Liverpool fans, and a further 27% support Manchester United or City. Those posts reach supporters well beyond his own team, Everton, building a cross-club, cross-city following rooted in perceived authenticity.

Share of voice and follower counts tell you how loud someone is. Audience intelligence tells you who is actually listening, why, and where the limits of that reach lie, the difference between a regional brand and a national one.

An FT report on transatlantic political dynamics used Pulsar audience data to quantify a detail otherwise hard to verify: how much overlap exists between UK political figures’ followings and US political audiences. Pulsar found a notably high share of one figure’s followers had strong ties to Maga-aligned audiences online, markedly higher than for others in the piece. This is what audience intelligence surfaces that polling and follower counts cannot: not just the size of an audience but its composition and the communities it overlaps with.

Modern governance needs a deep read of the digital public square. Pulsar’s experts explained how governments identify hidden concerns: a spike in search interest around a topic in a region lets them release educational material or adjust rules preemptively. During the pandemic, the Vaccine Sentiment Index helped address misinformation by targeting the exact community profiles most exposed to it. This audience-first approach ensures policies are effective and communicated in ways that resonate with different segments.

The reforms sparked 16,000 conversations in 24 hours. Segmenting by language and geography gave the UAE government a nuanced view of its global reputation. Local users were overwhelmingly positive, regional users expressed skepticism, and Western users read the reforms through their own democratic debates. Global sentiment is an illusion: every major event breaks into multiple, often conflicting narratives shaped by each audience’s cultural background.

Pulsar’s data from September 8 to October 1, 2020 showed Trump was highly effective at narrative steering. Focusing almost entirely on foreign policy, crime, and Covid-19, he forced media and opponents to respond to his agenda, drawing over twice Biden’s total attention. External shocks such as the New York Times report on his taxes could break that steering, producing the single biggest spike of the period, a reminder that even aggressive narratives can be derailed by high-impact journalism.

Pulsar’s work with Euronews focused on the social lifecycle of political messaging. While official slogans dominated the airwaves, real engagement on forums and social video was driven by grassroots reinterpretation that often contradicted the parties’ top-down narratives. Monitoring these divergent signals gave a more accurate pulse of the electorate than traditional polling, which misses the high-intensity, low-volume conversations that ultimately move voters.

In a landmark study for The Guardian, Pulsar (with 89up) analyzed millions of data points across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other platforms to identify the true drivers of the 2019 UK election. The economy, traditionally central, fell to third place. The dominant narratives were Brexit and the NHS, and the data surfaced a large volume of conversation, over 333,000 mentions, on racism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia.

The finding showed that social platforms had become the primary arena for identity-based political engagement, a trend that has only accelerated in later cycles.

The Guardian’s coverage drew on “The Iconic Image on Social Media,” a rapid research response from the Visual Social Media Lab using data provided and analyzed by Pulsar. The study reconstructed the photograph’s diffusion hour by hour, mapping how a single image left the Middle East and spread across the US, the UK, and Australia within hours. Francesco D’Orazio, co-founder of the Visual Social Media Lab and Pulsar’s VP of Product and Research, co-authored the report.

The most striking finding was a change in language. For most of 2015, “migrants” and “refugees” had run neck and neck, roughly 5.2 million versus 5.3 million posts across nine months. The image marked an inflection point. It is an early illustration of a principle that still defines Pulsar’s work: measuring reach is only the start, and the real insight lies in how a moment reshapes the language and emotion of a conversation.