Brandwatch vs. Social Mention

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Brandwatch
Score 8.3 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
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
Social Mention
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Social Mention is a free tool which is a kind of Google search for the social web. It provides basic search and alerts across a very broad variety of social channels.N/A
Pricing
BrandwatchSocial Mention
Editions & Modules
Pro
$800
10k mentions
Enterprise
3000+
Unlimited mentions or Queries
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
BrandwatchSocial Mention
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Best Alternatives
BrandwatchSocial Mention
Small Businesses
Simplify360
Simplify360
Score 7.8 out of 10
Simplify360
Simplify360
Score 7.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Mention
Mention
Score 9.4 out of 10
Mention
Mention
Score 9.4 out of 10
Enterprises
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Score 9.3 out of 10
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Score 9.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
BrandwatchSocial Mention
Likelihood to Recommend
4.3
(65 ratings)
8.0
(8 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(8 ratings)
8.0
(5 ratings)
Usability
6.1
(7 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
7.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
4.1
(13 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
6.4
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.1
(2 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Ease of integration
5.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
BrandwatchSocial Mention
Likelihood to Recommend
Cision
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.
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Social Mention
Social Mention is a great tool for monitoring social media. This Tool can also be used to search specifically taking the keywords in the blogs, comments, news etc. It offers a third party API for users. It can be used to send email to clients of their brand performance data. This tool can indicate if your mentions are angry, happy or neutral but the data can't be reliable.
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Pros
Cision
  • 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.
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Social Mention
  • Can predict future response from today's number.
  • Let's you judge which types of campaigns to run.
  • Has a very well managed dashboard of results.
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Cons
Cision
  • 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
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Social Mention
  • Under the "Free" dashboard you are limited to only receiving weekly results.
  • Can't negate those tags which contain my tags.
  • Lots of tweets missing, no noise filtering. Sometimes we get very old contents which are not needed.
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Likelihood to Renew
Cision
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.
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Social Mention
I love that Social Mention is so easy to use. It does not take a long time to learn how to navigate the site when you need information quickly. I don't use it as much in my new job, but I recommend it for basic monitoring and when you need social media information right away
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Usability
Cision
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
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Social Mention
No answers on this topic
Performance
Cision
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
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Social Mention
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Cision
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.
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Social Mention
No answers on this topic
Online Training
Cision
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
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Social Mention
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Cision
Not that I can think of.
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Social Mention
It doesn't work as well since we changed our name. We used to have a very unique twitter handle etc. so it was easier for social mention to find us. For folks who have unique names it's excellent if you don't it may not be that helpful.
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Alternatives Considered
Cision
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.
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Social Mention
Social Mention streamed everything together, calculated my sentiment for me, allows me to filter what results I am personally looking for, extract my RSS feed and navigate to one of the channels of buzz.
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Return on Investment
Cision
  • 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.
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Social Mention
  • The paid-version actually had a negative ROI for us as it would sometimes feed us topically inappropriate articles and didn't allow us to filter by source so as to eliminate inappropriate blogs and inappropriate news sources (like highly politically partisan ones).
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ScreenShots

Brandwatch Screenshots

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