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Before we pitch social listening to a single prospect, we use it ourselves: to map conversations, read the room, and build content that's actually grounded in what's happening out there.
There's a version of B2B marketing where you pick a target industry, write messaging that sounds relevant, and hope it resonates. We've tried to do something different. Before we create anything (a campaign, a report, a piece of content), our team listens first.
Here's what that actually looks like in practice.
When we set our sights on travel and hospitality as a priority vertical, the first question wasn't "what should we say to this audience?" It was "what is this audience already saying: to each other, about the brands they use, and about the experiences that matter to them?"
We used Lucidya's Social Listening and Media Monitoring to map the conversation happening across Arabic and English social channels, news outlets, and online media around regional airlines and travel brands. What we were looking for wasn't just topics, it was tone, tension, and timing. Where was excitement concentrated? Where was frustration building? What were travelers in the GCC actually talking about, in their own words?
We ran this analysis across two major travel windows: Summer Travel 2025 (June–August) and Eid Al Fitr 2025. The patterns that emerged weren't identical, but the strategic lessons were consistent.
Summer 2025: Emirates dominated online travel discussions during the peak summer months, generating over 167,000 engagements across the posts we tracked, but a significant portion of Qatar Airways' visibility was driven by unmanaged complaints around delays and baggage, not by campaigns. Kuwait Airways, with far lower volume, earned some of the most proportionally positive sentiment of the three, driven almost entirely by organic praise for crew attentiveness and service quality.
Eid Al Fitr 2025: When we monitored budget carriers during the Eid travel rush, the sentiment picture told a different story. Flynas led with a 93.2% positive sentiment score; the kind of number that doesn't happen by accident. FlyDubai followed at 81.2% positive, while Jazeera (65.3%) and SalamAir (68.5%) showed significantly higher negative sentiment, much of it tied to service gaps during peak demand. The dialect breakdown was also instructive: 38% of conversations happened in Modern Standard Arabic, but Saudi dialect (7.6%) and Gulf dialect (7.2%) were the next most common, a reminder that localized, culturally grounded engagement matters during high-emotion travel windows.
(Side note to travel brands: Eid Al Adha is around the corner, and summer 2026 is right after. Two back-to-back peaks. The conversation has already started. Just saying…)
Ramadan 2026: We also used our monitors to track the competitive battle between four food delivery apps in the UAE market during the highest-stakes delivery window of the year. Over the course of Ramadan (February 18 to March 15, 2026), we monitored how Talabat, Deliveroo, Careem, and Keeta competed for attention at the iftar moment. Talabat generated the fewest posts (1,217) but the highest engagement per post (70.8), a sign of deep cultural relevance, though 46% negative sentiment driven by refund delays showed the operational cost of that visibility. Deliveroo's conversation was overwhelmingly global (less than 1% from the UAE, only 0.68% in Arabic), despite its riders delivering locally. Careem earned the highest positive sentiment (22.08%) from its super app convenience, but negative sentiment around ride cancellations and surge pricing bled into its food delivery perception. Keeta dominated volume with 25,075 posts, but 79% neutral sentiment and only 4.1 average engagement per post revealed a brand being mentioned often but engaged with rarely.
Monitoring all four apps simultaneously gave us a live read on how sentiment, share of voice, and engagement patterns shift when brands compete for the same cultural moment. That comparative lens is something we can now bring into conversations with QSR brands, delivery platforms, and retail clients operating in seasonal markets.
What the data told us, clearly, was that this wasn't a conversation about technology or features. It was a conversation about trust, responsiveness, and the gap between what passengers expected and what they actually experienced. Some brands were managing that gap well. Others weren't, and the sentiment scores reflected it immediately.
That kind of picture doesn't come from desk research. It comes from listening at scale. And once we had it, we knew what narrative to build our campaign around: the cost of silence, and what it looks like when brands actually respond.
The other place this pays off is in major events. When the F1 season closed in late November and early December with back-to-back Grand Prix weekends in Qatar and Abu Dhabi, we saw an opportunity not just to observe, but to produce something useful from what we were seeing.
Using Lucidya Social Listening and Media Monitoring, we tracked both race weekends across their full arc: pre-race buildup, race weekend itself, and the days after. The numbers were significant: the Qatar Grand Prix generated over 203,000 posts and 4.7 million engagements on X alone. Abu Dhabi, as the season finale, generated fewer posts (around 160,000) but actually produced higher total engagement, 5.65 million, driven by the championship moment itself when Lando Norris was confirmed as the 2025 Formula 1 World Champion in a post that reached 23.9 million views.
That contrast was one of the more interesting findings. Qatar generated more conversation; Abu Dhabi generated more reaction. Volume and impact don't always move together, and the difference matters for any brand thinking about how to show up around big events. High post volume can mean a noisy, fragmented conversation. High engagement per post means people are stopping, watching, and responding; a fundamentally different kind of attention.
We also tracked sentiment across both weekends. Qatar had higher emotional volatility, sharper positive peaks driven by the night race atmosphere and on-track drama, but also a higher share of negative posts around race decisions and the teams' strategy debates. Abu Dhabi was calmer and more conclusive. Once the outcome was clear (Norris taking the title), sentiment stabilized quickly. The narrative was resolved.
For our team, this kind of analysis isn't academic. It tells us something about how audiences in this region engage with large-scale live experiences, and that directly informs how we talk to hospitality brands, event organizers, and tourism bodies about what social listening can do for them. We can show up to those conversations with data we gathered ourselves, using our own platform, about events their customers were actively part of.
We've done this across other verticals, too. When Dubai Fashion Week ran in early September 2025, we monitored the full event window. What stood out wasn't just the volume, it was the audience split: the conversation was genuinely international, happening in multiple languages, with different emotional centers depending on where the audience was based. That kind of breakdown tells fashion brands and event organizers something useful: their regional activations are being watched globally, and the conversation isn't just happening on the runway; it's happening on timelines.
We've tracked moments that matter beyond our target verticals. When Al Hilal faced Manchester City in the FIFA Club World Cup quarter-finals in July 2025, it wasn't just a football match; it was a cultural moment for Saudi Arabia. Monitoring that conversation didn't directly inform a campaign brief, but it kept our team calibrated to what's resonating in our home market and sharpened our ability to read real-time sentiment dynamics across regional audiences.
Before we talk about what the data taught us, it's worth showing how we actually use the tool regularly.
We start with listening monitors, not guesses. Every project begins the same way: we set up a monitor tailored to what we're trying to understand. For the travel campaign, that meant tracking specific airlines (Emirates, Qatar Airways, Kuwait Airways, Flynas, and FlyDubai), industry keywords (delays, baggage, service, and crew), and relevant hashtags across Arabic and English. We monitor social media, news outlets, blogs, and forums, so we're not just catching what's loud on social media; we're catching the full conversation.
We customize dashboards by function. Our marketing team doesn't need the same view as our leadership team. We've built separate dashboards for campaign performance, competitor benchmarking, and real-time crisis signals. The marketing dashboard tracks sentiment trends and volume spikes around the brands we're monitoring. The leadership dashboard shows share of voice, overall brand health, and high-level competitive positioning. When we're running live event monitoring (like F1 or FIFA Club World Cup), we use the Live Dashboard to track selected KPIs in real time, which means that we don’t wait until Monday to see what happened over the weekend.
We set alerts for the spikes, shifts, and surprises. Traffic spikes. Negative sentiment jumps. Influencer mentions. We don't want to find out three days later that a conversation turned sour. The alert system means we know when something's moving. Those alerts have changed a campaign narrative more than once.
We use sentiment analysis to separate noise from signal. Volume tells you how much people are talking. Sentiment tells you how they're talking. When we saw Qatar Airways generating high visibility during summer travel, sentiment analysis showed us that a significant portion was complaint-driven, not campaign-driven. That's a different strategic picture than raw mention volume would suggest. We also use single-post analysis when something goes viral to understand why it landed the way it did.
We benchmark obsessively. Every monitor we set up includes competitor tracking. For travel, that meant watching how other airlines' sentiment and share of voice compared across the same time windows. Benchmarking keeps us honest about whether what we're seeing is an outlier or part of a pattern.
The workflow is consistent: set up the monitor, build the dashboard, activate alerts, check sentiment and volume daily, pull reports weekly, and use filters to narrow in on what's actually actionable. It's not complicated, but it is disciplined. And discipline is what makes the difference between having a listening tool and actually listening.
The practical impact of working this way shows up in a few places.
Our content is more specific. Instead of writing generically about "understanding your customers," we're publishing reports grounded in real data from real events, real industries, and real conversations happening right now in the region. The Summer Travel 2025 report we released wasn't built on assumptions about what airlines and their passengers care about. It was built on tens of thousands of posts tracked and analyzed through the same platform we ask our prospects to trust.
Our sales conversations are more credible. When a travel brand asks us how Lucidya performs on Arabic-language sentiment around service quality or delays, we're not pointing to a case study from a different market. We've run that analysis ourselves. We know what the data looks like. We can walk them through it.
Our instincts are better calibrated. Our integrated marketing manager puts it simply: "Monitor is the first place I go before drafting any brief. It shifted our mindset from reactive execution to insight-led strategy, redefining how I assess market signals, audience sentiment, and competitive movement before we take the first step."
There's a difference between knowing your platform has 92% Arabic sentiment analysis accuracy and actually living with that capability day-to-day, watching it surface the distinction between a complaint that's venting and one that's about to go viral, or catching the moment a campaign lands differently than expected. Using our own product keeps us honest about what it actually does, which makes us better at explaining why it matters.
We're aware that "we use our own tools" can sound like a marketing line. Every company says some version of it. What we're trying to describe here is something more specific: the process of starting with listening before messaging, and what that discipline produces.
It means we spent time inside our Social Listening platform before we built our travel and hospitality campaign, not after. It means we were tracking public conversations in real time because we were genuinely curious about what millions of people were actually saying and feeling. It means the reports we put into the market are outputs of the same workflow we're selling, not just collateral about it.
If you're marketing in the Arab world and you're not starting with the conversation, you're starting late. That's what the data consistently shows us, and it's the thing we're most confident saying to the industries we work with, because it's the thing we've had to learn ourselves.
Explore our latest industry reports: Summer Travel 2025, Eid Al Fitr Budget Airlines 2025, Ramadan 2026 Food Delivery Apps, F1 Qatar & UAE Grand Prix 2025, Dubai Fashion Week 2025, and Al Hilal at FIFA World Cup 2025, all produced using Lucidya Monitor.
Or book a demo to see how the platform works firsthand.
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لوسيديا منصة الذكاء الاصطناعي الرائدة في تحليل تجارب العملاء وإدارتها، وقد صُممت خصيصًا لتلبية احتياجات العالم العربي. توحّد لوسيديا أدوات الاستماع الاجتماعي والرصد الإعلامي وملفات تعريف العملاء والاستبيانات، إلى جانب قدرات الأتمتة المدعومة بالذكاء الاصطناعي والتفاعل متعدد القنوات، في منظومة متكاملة تتيح لك فهم رحلة العميل بأكملها وقياسها وتحسينها.
تربط لوسيديا جميع قنوات التواصل مع العملاء، بما فيها الشبكات الاجتماعية، ووسائل الإعلام والاستبيانات وقنوات الدعم ضمن نظام ذكي واحد. وتحوّل البيانات الخام إلى رؤى واضحة وعملية، ليتمكّن فريقك من رصد مشاعر الجمهور لحظة بلحظة، وتخصيص رسائل الدعم والتسويق، وحماية سمعة مؤسستك، وتعزيز رضا العملاء.
لا تعتمد لوسيديا على أدوات الذكاء الاصطناعي الجاهزة غير المتخصصة بالعربية، بل طورت تقنياتها داخليًا ودربت نموذجها على ١٥ لهجة عربية لضمان دقة عالية في فهم المشاعر ونبرة حديث الجمهور ضمن منطقة الشرق الأوسط وشمال أفريقيا.
نعم، تلتزم لوسيديا بلوائح الخصوصية المحلية والإقليمية، بما في ذلك نظام حماية البيانات الشخصية السعودي (PDPL) ومعايير اللائحة العامة لحماية البيانات (GDPR) حيثما ينطبق ذلك.
Lucidya is the leading platform for customer experience management in the Arab World. With unique AI and NLU capabilities, this CXM platform is designed to give brands the power to deliver game-changing customer experiences anywhere in the region.
Lucidya is the leading platform for customer experience management in the Arab World. With unique AI and NLU capabilities, this CXM platform is designed to give brands the power to deliver game-changing customer experiences anywhere in the region.
Lucidya is the leading platform for customer experience management in the Arab World. With unique AI and NLU capabilities, this CXM platform is designed to give brands the power to deliver game-changing customer experiences anywhere in the region.
Lucidya is the leading platform for customer experience management in the Arab World. With unique AI and NLU capabilities, this CXM platform is designed to give brands the power to deliver game-changing customer experiences anywhere in the region.
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