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
Helixa
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
Helixa Discovery, from Helixa in New York, is the company's core analytics engine that equips users with the tools to understand what’s distinctive about any audience and what they care about.
Helixa is just a completely different beast entirely. Where other consumer research boils down their insights into reports, Helixa allows you to go through audience data with a fine tooth comb, also providing the opportunity for direct comparison across different brands or …
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.
Users have to be upfront with clients on where Helixa is pulling data from or they could get the wrong idea about the insights. Helixa pulls from a number of sources to gain insight but may not specifically be from the owned channel social audience. By using total social view, you can potentially get the audience data for your Twitter channel which can add specificity to your insights but they can differ from the overall consumer audience. Helixa is best used as a starting point, a place to get ideas and pull supporting data to understand patterns in behavior about an audience. I would not necessarily take its word as gospel, just one piece of a larger insight. My favorite section are the opinions as they show what is most important to the specific audience and can really help get the wheels turning. My least favorite section are the influencer categories. From my experience with Helixa, the influencers tend to skew political and mainstream which is not necessarily what clients are looking for when trying to understand what kind of people are influencing audiences. I also mind that Helixa pulls in a lot of unnecessary social apps like Flickr or Foursquare which are hardly used anymore.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Helixa is just a completely different beast entirely. Where other consumer research boils down their insights into reports, Helixa allows you to go through audience data with a fine tooth comb, also providing the opportunity for direct comparison across different brands or demographic groups. While we did pick Helixa, I can’t emphasize the need for making Helixa one tool in a tool box. While Mintel was a tool we considered that was similar-ish, we also use Mintel now to help complement Helixas insights
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.
