Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review Pulsar is well suited for delivering social listening campaign insights and reporting over a longer period of time. The information and report we create are great... eventually, but it takes a long time to feel like they have gathered enough content that we can readily use. If they were able to speed up the delivery of the data and insights that would be incredibly helpful for our teams in many instances where we have a short runway to providing insights for our clients.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Social listening across multiple platforms Identifies target audiences with easily understood data visualizations Provides customizable, engaging reports with impressive quality assets Read full review Cons Very steep learning curve- good luck training casual users on the difference between a query, a rule, a category etc Lack of access to FULL historic data is a serious drawback- populating that data takes a minimum of 24 hours and incurs additional costs Volume limits mean you may have to build your query to exclude mentions that may be useful in getting the full context of the situation Read full review Pulsar is awesome. However it would be great if they were able to pull data and insights across a few other social platforms that we know our targets are using. Having easily accessible "Hot To" videos on platform use would have definitely helped us get off the ground faster. They should do away with the need to have to use boolean information in order to access deeper dives into searches. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Usability 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
Read full review Performance 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
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Online Training 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
Read full review Implementation Rating Not that I can think of.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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 .
Read full review Pulsar does an excellent job standing up to and standing out from their competition. The thing that attracted us to the platform is its ongoing platform updates and improvements. A lot of SAS platforms get people to sign up and then they don't continue to refine their platform. They don't stay ahead of the curve in delivering leading-edge solutions. Pulsar has continued to modify and expand its solutions. That's really important - especially when you are recommending platform investments for your company... that last thing you want is to talk something up and then it doesn't deliver. Pulsar definitely has delivered.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Ease of use Great data visualization options Increased client engagement during reporting and presentations Read full review ScreenShots