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 Determine what your research question or customer relations needs are to pick a tool that is a good match.
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 Using volume and association metrics to assess and predict trends and emerging topics Use the articles metric to drill down into specific posts, such as tweets, Facebook, blog comments, news articles General Sentiment has the ability to access password protected sites to access information that may not normally show up in standard internet searches 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 The application does take time to start gathering data on a specific topic. As such, its important to include as many keyword search topics as possible, and also be sure to refine them as you gather data. The user interface isn't particularly intuitive, there is some work that could be done to streamline its use. 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 Social media tools are constantly evolving. I would want to be sure that my research question was complimented by the metrics and options presented by the social media tool. General Sentiment is very useful and innovative and their customer service was excellent. Their sales and customer service team was very helpful in onboarding our staff and being flexible with our needs.
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 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 Social media analytics can accelerate the speed with which researchers can investigate a topic of interest, at a lower cost. Due to the low barrier to entry (e.g., most social media sites and blogs are free), data collection burden, as traditionally defined, is significantly reduced or eliminated. The absence of direct interactions between researchers and the study population may do more to mitigate sources of bias compared to other more intrusive forms of data collection (i.e., interviews, focus groups). Used to to gather unstructured data and feedback from Medicare beneficiaries, caregivers, advocates, and other stakeholders to identify systemic issues that beneficiaries encounter. Read full review ScreenShots