Brandwatch, from Cision (acquired February 2021) is an enterprise social intelligence platform that is designed to allow brands to listen and analyze online conversation to extract meaningful insights, inform their business decisions and understand more about the return on their marketing spend.
$800
10k mentions
Cision PRWeb
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
Cision PRWeb aims to impact customer behavior by providing efficient communication tools to continuously engage with target audiences across multiple online channels including search, social media and with industry-specific partner websites, bloggers and influencers.
The user interface is great and is easy to use for social media marketers of all ranges. In regard to planning and scheduling content, it allows all users with access to the capability to view all upcoming on an actual calendar. For organizational purposes, this is great and mitigates any confusion that other team members may have. The tool seems to always be updating which has its pros and cons because once you figure something out, there's a switch and you'll need to relearn how things are positioned but overall, it's not a heavy lift.
Wire press release distribution is often a luxury purchase, especially at the price point. In my experience Cision acts as if it's destined to win everyone's business just because of its name. Too often we've found ourselves being turned off by the arrogance and taking our business (and our clients' business) to alternative companies that are happy to have us.
Clean, beautiful visuals that can be easily incorporated into reports to be used internally and externally.
Customization-- anywhere from the queries you create to adjusting individual report widget/components this tool is very flexible.
Excellent Customer Service and support. My Brandwatch rep is always open to hearing from me for questions and often reaches out to me to check in on my status or see if I would like to participate in beta programs.
Constant innovation. It seems like Brandwatch is constantly updating and adding improvements to their platform--especially with their 2019 acquisition of Crimson Hexagon.
PRWeb is fairly easy to use to issue press releases. They have a review process that will look over your release before submission although this review is not going to catch spelling and grammatical errors.
I've seen our press releases posted on industry relevant websites thanks to the reach that PRWeb provided us.
Although I never used it because we subscribed to a different service, PRWeb allows you to create and send email blasts within their OutMarket marketing platform.
I enjoy the ability to add a quote call out in the release.
I also like that images or videos can be added to the release.
Increasing the volume of media that can receive communication would help - going from 5,000 to 7,500 or 10,000 would be a massive help.
Providing a social media platform in which to send out either X posts, LinkedIn, and Facebook posts to media as an alternative communication would help
Increasing the number of podcasters and there contact details would help.
Brandwatch is a simple tool that is easy to learn and understand. Without any rigorous training, the team can learn to use it and interpret the results in an efficient manner. It saves a lot of work and helps the team to focus on other important time consuming tasks. I would like to continue using Brandwatch.
We are unlikely to renew PRWeb because I feel that the costs outweigh the benefits of the service. For a company like ours (small business with about 60 employees) we don't have enough press that warrants monthly coverage. We may look at using PRWeb on an as needed basis, 3-4 times a year for single submissions, but that would be the extent of it. I could see PRWeb being much more beneficial for large companies that are constantly needing to issue press.
I've invited quite a few of my colleagues to try Brandwatch, and all of them were able to use its features with no assistance, and most of these had never used a social listening/monitoring tool before, or even a digital analytics tool! Brandwatch is not only easy to use, but filters, widgets, menus and other options are in intuitive places - it just works
The Cision PRWeb platform is mostly intuitive. It is broken into Monitoring, Social, Insights, and Outreach sections. The way Mention Streams are set up and organized has confused employees who are new to the dashboard. Under Outreach, the Launchpad and Activities tabs are a little bit redundant and could probably be consolidated.
Brandwatch craps out sometimes. Pages freeze, data doesn't populate for hours. It's fine if you're not in a hurry but something to keep in mind if you're working in real-time. It's not as bad as Talkwalker but it's impacted timely delivery of work for me, and one of the first things I teach when introducing the platform is the process for closing out and re-logging in to see if it unfreezes
We have not had to reach out to the team for much support but when we did, The support from the Team has been Superb. We were given the assistance needed once requested by the Team. We would recommend Falcon not only because the product is simply amazing but also because of the level of support we have reached.
I have only required support from PRWeb on two separate occasions and they handled my issues without any problems. I was a bit confused at first not sure if they had received my requests but shortly after I received responses and was able to move forward with my press release.
good knowledge, great tips, although the program seems a bit disconnected. It could improve it they create more free webinars and a good content calendar and tackle little topics in each webinar. Their trainers are top notch and they know a lot about the tool but they fall a bit low on technical level understanding of how the tool actually works
If you're using it to monitor your brand's social presence only, or if you're in an agency and using it to monitor existing clients and provide reports to them, then this is a great tool and you're hard-pressed to find something better. But if you're wanting it more for new business and discovery, there are tools that do this much better, including Sysomos and Crimson Hexagon. So it depends on what specifically you're trying to do. My agency was already using this product when I arrived, so I did not have a choice in the matter, but I've evaluated both of these other tools. Crimson is similar enough that the slight increase in cost doesn't justify switching. Synthesio is the most expensive competitor in the market (no matter what they tell you), but you get what you pay for. If you can afford it, go with Synthesio.
It is not an "either-or" situation. If a company really wants to put a release out on the wire, one service might be better suited for it than the other. For when a company wants to target certain countries or vertical markets (e.g. Latin America), PR Newswire would be the proper choice.
At a high level, the biggest impact the Brandwatch Analytics has had is giving us the ability to quantify the impact of social media for our clients. In the world of social, ROI is defined and interpreted differently across clients (particularly where it's more difficult to apply traditional ROI) - so this may mean reporting on earned media for some, while for others it's measuring increasing engagements or social mentions over time.
