The UK’s Most Talked About Cities 2024
The UK’s Most Talked About Cities 2024
“Cities of Culture orchestrate inward investment”
Driving cultural conversations is crucial for inward investment.
Culture is the key component which drives digital content. Using your city’s soft power assets powers these conversations.
Activating cultural capital generates opportune moments to leverage digital conversations and garner investment.
Analysis reveals the true long-term impact of City of Culture status.
As UK cities compete for inward investment in a competitive landscape, failing to communicate cultural assets effectively can reduce the impact of a city's investment protects.
The UK's most digitally visible cities are capitalising on culture to drive investment. Culture is a critical tool for of elevating a city brand. In this edition of The UK’s Most Talked About Cities, ING Media has conducted detailed analysis of the impact and value cultural institutions, and cities’ soft power on their brand perception.
Analysis also reveals the power culture wields on a city’s investment prospects: the fastest growing UK city for digital visibility is next year's 'Capital of Culture', Bradford; two of the top ten cities are previous UK or European capitals of culture; and the cities that punch most above their weight for digital visibility are using culture to raise their profiles.
For the first time, we examine the tangible communications benefits of City of Culture status and investigate which cities are overachieving relative to their competitors, based on population size. We analyse which UK cities are mentioned most frequently around inward investment, in order to determine which locations are currently recognised internationally as attractive investment destinations.
We also show that a strong correlation exists between the strength of a city’s soft power assets and its ability to generate digital content geared toward inward investment.
London has retained its crown as the UK’s most talked about city by increasing its digital output by 4% year-on-year. Its conversation share is so significant that it accounts for almost half of all conversations we tracked last year.
Manchester, currently in third place, is closing the gap on second-placed Liverpool, with its visibility being driven by both sports and culture. The treble success of Manchester City FC, hosting of Davis Cup tennis matches, and Chanel's Métiers d’Art show increased Manchester’s visibility by 12%. Despite hosting the Eurovision Song Contest, Liverpool’s digital footprint reduced 23% from 2022 - an indication of the importance of building momentum in content around global events. Newcastle is the greatest climber within the top ten cities, jumping from seventh to fourth, with infrastructure and sport powering its content.
ING Media’s research into the UK’s most talked about cities has entered its 6th year. The research provides critical intelligence on the impact of digital messaging on the success of cities as brands and as investment destinations. Measuring their digital visibility provides a clear insight into how these cities perform compared to their peers. Our research ranks 50 cities, principally members of the UK’s three most important city networks; Key Cities, Core Cities and the Scottish Cities Alliance.
While the overall ranking position of the UK’s most visible cities has remained largely unchanged, there have been some significant upward movers outside the top ten. Wrexham (+6), Coventry (+4) and Preston (+4) all increased their position in our rankings in 2023.
ING Media’s investigation into The UK’s Most Talked About Cities (2024) covered 50 cities and ranked them by digital mentions across 2023. These mentions originate from online news, ‘X’ (Twitter), forums, blogs, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, comments and reviews. Spelling variants included to cover the following languages; English, Chinese (simplified), Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, German, French, Malaysian, Indonesian, as well as the city’s native language. Mentions containing sports, in particular football, have been limited. Key topic shares, generated from a set of keywords unique to each category, represent only English mentions.
ING Media’s Soft Power rankings categorizes our selected 50 cities by several quantifiable social and cultural metrics that impact a city’s potential exposure on a global stage. These metrics include Number of stadia [25,000 capacity and above], number of museums and galleries across all faculties, number of Universities, number of hotel rooms, non-native born population, number of airports that serve city, UNESCO world heritage sites, number of Michelin Star restaurants, annual population change and a ING Media ‘Green Score’ defined by multiple criteria including [City Net Zero Carbon Target [Year], Air Quality [PM2.5 ug/m3], and Green Area [GA, %].
If you would like to learn more about the report and how ING works with cities: citiesunit@ing-media.com
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