New Trends in Digital Marketing: Analysis of the Social Conversation on X.com About Metaverse and Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

This study proposes a mixed methodology to analyze the social conversation around two digital marketing trends: the metaverse and artificial intelligence (AI). The aim of this research is to find out which actors are leading the social conversation around the metaverse and AI on X.com, in order to identify which types of companies or entrepreneurs are setting new trends in digital marketing and to what extent they reproduce gender biases. Methodologically, data mining was used to collect messages through its application programming interface and their subsequent processing. All posts tagged with the hashtags #Metaverse and #AI, along with their Spanish translations, were downloaded. The total sample comprised 123,580 posts from 45,622 different users. Subsequently, the content was analyzed using digital ethnography to establish who is leading the conversation and what are the emerging themes. The results show that the companies leading the conversation are digital projects or recently created start-ups; among the users with the most likes, retweets or replies, there are no large innovative companies. In the case of content creators, those who receive the most likes are characters created with AI that represent highly sexualized and objectified women.