Brandwatch vs. Tailwind

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.

Tailwind can schedule your Pinteret pins, but it's an expensive platform to do this, and given it seems to miss many, it does not even do this well. Further, they continue to get you to reconnect, so it is cumbersome and poorly designed. We used it only because our vendors wanted it, but it's been a total waste of money given how poorly designed it is, how buggy it is and how useless the other so-called services they provide are. Go somewhere else as there are way better solutions as we have now found.

• 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.

Incentivized

• The extension for Chrome and Safari has been EXTREMELY helpful. Through research and continuing education, we frequently see information we'd like to share with our audience and the extension has made this so easy.
• The SmartLoop feature is great for times when we get busy and may not have the time to add new things to our queue. I know even if I had zero time to devote to social media that day, I was still active and getting information to our candidates.
• Interface is extremely user friendly. A lot of time these programs that are supposed to help us and bring ease to our workload are so complicated and intense that they cause more stress than they relieve. This is not true with Tailwind. Tailwind is easy to use and truly does take a load of stress off us as an organization.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• When you add a link to your post and add the caption, it goes to the first line and not where I had the cursor. I do not want the link to be the first thing people read.
• The Tailwind Create is fun and helpful but still hard to use.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

Tailwind is great when it focuses on it's core functionality. However, in my opinion, Tailwind isn't great at listening to their customers and instead likes to add features that are not beneficial and tend to "break" the other features that ultimately sell it's product. In my opinion, it has lost ROI over time and was much better 3-4 years ago.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I have received wonderful support from Tailwind. Recently when I was on their new Tailwind Create and was looking at their site photos, I had a question and I received an answer in less than 24 hours. They have also been receptive to comments and ideas to make the product better and they used some of the ideas as well giving us a discount for the help.

Incentivized

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

Not that I can think of.

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.

Incentivized

When I was looking for a solution for Instagram, neither Buffer nor Hootsuite were offering the ability to post directly to Instagram. That may have changed recently, but in my opinion, Tailwind is a much more user-friendly, less (unnecessarily) complex solution for Instagram management. I don't need a ton of in-depth analytics; I just need to be able to be efficient, consistent and engaging in my posts. Tailwind allows me to do that without getting bogged down in all the bells and whistles on Hootsuite or Buffer.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Definitely an ROI - We have increased our clicks on our website due to traffic from Pinterest, primarily from our Smart Loop.
• We have increased Pinterest following due to our intensive use of Smart Loop, which has led to #1 (increased website traffic).
• Organization and time management has been a massive advantage of utilizing Tailwind. Because I can set Smart Loop and not worry about it, I can dedicate my time to other areas of the business.

Incentivized