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
Shoutlet (Discontinued)
Score 2.0 out of 10
N/A
Shoutlet is a cloud-based social relationship platform that enables marketers to publish, engage and measure social marketing campaigns and activities on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Google+, and YouTube.
The product’s focus is on quantifying return on social, integrating social data into business and scaling social across the enterprise. Features include tools for social CRM, creative design, social listening, ads, workflow management, contest design…
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.
I think Shoutlet is an excellent tool for any mid-sized to larger company looking to improve their social strategy. While it does have some minor improvements that can be made, it's overall an impressive way to mass post to multiple networks and interact and engage with your followers in the social space. I feel at this time that a smaller company could probably benefit from a lesser in-depth version of this tool at this time
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.
The ability to manage and publish to various social accounts from one platform. This feature helped us to have a cohesive social strategy and saved us a lot of time having to go back and forth between accounts.
The module that allowed us to build contests and custom landing pages was perhaps my favorite part. For the contests, it proved to be ultra convenient to be able to build, host and run social promotions through the same platform that housed our social accounts and lists. From a landing-page-design standpoint, it was also wonderful and time-effective for each individual department to be able to build professional and dynamic pages themselves rather than tasking it to our web designers who really didn't have the time.
I was also very pleased with the customer service we received from the Shoulet team. From the original demo, to the training sessions, all the way through to back-end service maintenance, everyone we dealt with was available, accommodating and friendly. Not entirely common in this day in age.
I would like to see Shoutlet improve the usability of their "Shoutlet Profiles" module. It has improved over time, but I would like to see more individual user metrics such as affinity, time spent engaged per user, and monthly interactions by user.
I would also like to see Shoutlet redesign their "manage urls" module and URL shortener. The shortener works well, but I would like the interface to be more user friendly, and be able to access it throughout the rest of the tool. Perhaps in a slide out drawer.
Unfortunately, Shoutlet does not offer a Pin scheduling tool at this time. This would be a HUGE asset for them to have.
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.
While I do not have direct control over the renewal of our contract, I am definitely lobbying to not only renew the contract, but expand our contract with Shoutlet to include more of our company's accounts in our Shoutlet account for the many reasons already stated. By pulling all of our accounts, pages and platforms into one media management tool, we'll be able to better serve our fans, members, patients and employees. It will cut down time it takes for us to post across our entire company's breadth of social media options while sharing more easily between locations and entities. For medium and large scale enterprises, Shoutlet is hard to beat.
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
While some things do require a little training, a quick phone training session or reading an online guide usually suffices. I've never needed multiple training sessions for any part of Shoutlet. As someone with very little coding/programming background (read: absolutely none), I am always able to accomplish what is needed without feeling over my head or needing help.
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.
I feel that the level of support I get from Shoutlet is far beyond the level of support I've received from other companies in a variety of services. It would be nice to have a regular update from Tech Therapy that lists out any potential bugs they're working to fix for the various browsers they support. Sometimes I wonder if I'm experiencing an issue simply because I use Firefox vs. Chrome.
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.
Shoutlet is infinitely more advanced than SocialMadeSimple. It is a much more complex and in-depth platform. We actually changed to SocialMadeSimple after Shoutlet and I miss how easy to use and advanced it was in comparison. It was a money decision but if they were the same price, I would absolutely insist we go back
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.
Allows our small staff to provide our clients with world-class service and data.
Exponentially improved fan base expansion for our clients.
Rapid response for customer service issues for clients - allowing us to help our clients prevent their social media presence from becoming the Complaint Department, rather a true community of fans and supporters of a brand.
