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
Synthesio Social Intelligence Suite
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Synthesio, an Ipsos company (acquired 2019) offers social monitoring and engagement tools. Synthesio competes with major listening vendors like Radian6 and Sysomos.
A point of differentiation is that Synthesio offers a mix of technology and human analysis. In their view, human analysis is required to validate and interpret the data.
Customers are large, particularly French, brands.
A real edge for Brandwatch is how easy and flexible you can play around with data. It becomes more of a real analysis platform that serves different business objectives rather than visualization and informative output.
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 …
As an analyst, the biggest pro for Brandwatch Analytics is the HUGE set of variables that are available when downloading the data. The biggest advantage that competitors (like NetBase) have is more advanced Natural Language Processing which makes capabilities like sentiment …
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.
It's a very good tool. It covers every need we have for social media listening & monitoring. Bad thing is that those who were selling us the software were not much concerned about costs and were not reducing although there are a lot of market leaders like Sprinklr who are really good with compensation & value addition
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.
Synthesio has an unlimited volume, which helps us to not worry about going over budget. This helps us focus on refining our search to pull in the mentions that have the most value.
Synthesio has an excellent support team. They are always available to answer any questions we 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.
Ben Farkas was the representative that worked with us on this project, while we have been very excited with the work he provided, especially the customer service, we just did not have enough time with the product hands on to be comfortable giving it the 10 we think it deserves. As the Data tracking was done beyond our expectations and the finished product (infographic) were all excellent, we used this service to fill our need in being shorthanded to cover the data ourselves. Synthesio provided outstanding customer service, their data tracking and materials where top notch, just we lacked the hands on experience to speak to everyday use.
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.
Everything we needed was handled, in many cases during the first time we used Synthesio the representative made adjustments and explained them to us, some things we did not even consider when setting up the service.
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.
I have used Meltwater, Hootsuite for the same tracking purpose. Every tool has it own pros and cons. The best way to decide is go by the reviews of the people who have actually used it. Budget is yet another factor to consider.
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.
