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
KUKU.io
Score 1.1 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
KUKU.io social media tools allow users to schedule posts on 10 social networks, including Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin, Telegram, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, OK.ru, Vk.com, and Tumblr, without any risks of a ban. KUKU.io is an official partner of these social networks. In KUKU.io social media analytics users can analyze content engagement compare posts with special filters (by clicks, likes, comments, shares), count reach and monitor team performance. Users can add colleagues in KUKU.io…
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.
If you would like a reliable scheduling tool, KUKU.io is not the one to use. If you like to share lots of industry news, secondary content, or content from your website/blog, be aware that KUKU.io will corrupt the preview headline. You would be far better off using another scheduling tool. I have now changed to a free tool and it has all the same capabilities without this corruption issue. I also used paid ones which are equally good.
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.
io corrupts headlines of articles you reshare. When you schedule a post with a URL in it, the Title of the blog post that is displayed below the picture/preview gets corrupted. So if you add any text in with the URL, that will replace the headline. I have noticed this on both LinkedIn and Twitter.
Very poor support team. I have found that the support team at KUKU.io are extremely rude, unwilling to help you and take a long time to reply. On some occasions I have had to message them three times in the chatbot for them to even reply. None of these times has the issue been resolved. When I reported to them that KUKU.io was corrupting headlines, at first they refused to take responsibility. Finally, they admitted it was the platforms fault but said they were not doing anything at that time to fix it.
Analytics are poor. The analytics suite in KUKU.io does not give you anything analytics for LinkedIn. The ones it provides for Twitter you can get directly from Twitter. So no value is added there.
You cannot tag LinkedIn accounts. I use HubSpot to schedule social media posts which allows you to tag companies at least. KUKU.io cannot.
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
The Brandwatch Consumer Research customer success team is outstanding. Every member of their team has been wildly helpful and remarkably pleasant. These people go above and beyond to ensure you have all the tools and help you need to find success on their platform. I had several calls where we discussed difficulties users where having on the platform that resulted in an overall improvement in reporting across the board. They didn't just answer our questions, they dug deeper to find root problems and helped us build out dashboards to alleviate them.
The support team are extremely rude and often unresponsive. All of the issues I have reported to Kuku has been responded to with "we are not looking to resolve this issue at this time." On a few occasions, they have tried to deny the issue lies with them, before evidence has been provided. Then, they have refused to fix the issue.
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.
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.
