Skip to main content
TrustRadius
Brandwatch

Brandwatch

Overview

What is Brandwatch?

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…

Read more
Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Brandwatch is a highly regarded social media monitoring tool that offers a wide range of use cases for businesses and organizations. Users …
Continue reading
Read all reviews

Reviewer Pros & Cons

View all pros & cons
Return to navigation

Pricing

View all pricing

Pro

$800

Cloud
10k mentions

Enterprise

3000+

Cloud
Unlimited mentions or Queries

Entry-level set up fee?

  • Setup fee optional

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Return to navigation

Product Demos

Take your Brandwatch data anywhere: The power of the API

YouTube

Brandwatch is... More Simple to Use

YouTube

Brandwatch has... More Filters

YouTube

Social Media: Measurement and Reporting

YouTube

Brandwatch has... More Data Quality

YouTube

Brandwatch Experts: 1. Sentiment Analysis

YouTube
Return to navigation

Product Details

What is Brandwatch?

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.

Brandwatch Features

  • Supported: Proprietary listening technology providing quality data coverage
  • Supported: The most advanced, customizable charting and analysis functionality available
  • Supported: Unlimited users and a range of distrubution, sharing and permissions options
  • Supported: Flexible dashboards with over 25 different components
  • Supported: 30+ fully-supported languages, including Topics and sentiment extraction
  • Supported: Sophisticated demographic and theme analysis
  • Supported: Owned Twitter and Facebook channel tools
  • Supported: Automated, intelligent and custom alerting features
  • Supported: Bulk processing and automation of categorization and tagging

Brandwatch Screenshots

Screenshot of

Brandwatch Video

Brandwatch Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Digimind Social, Infegy Atlas, and MutualMind are common alternatives for Brandwatch.

Reviewers rate Social Analytics & Insight highest, with a score of 8.1.

The most common users of Brandwatch are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).

Brandwatch Customer Size Distribution

Consumers1%
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)9%
Mid-Size Companies (51-500 employees)20%
Enterprises (more than 500 employees)70%
Return to navigation

Comparisons

View all alternatives
Return to navigation

Reviews and Ratings

(150)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Brandwatch is a highly regarded social media monitoring tool that offers a wide range of use cases for businesses and organizations. Users have praised its ability to track and measure content on various social media platforms, making it invaluable for understanding consumer social media conversations and informing social and content strategies. The platform is widely used for analytics, competitive set tracking, social listening, research, and planning activities. It has also been lauded for its role in recognizing customer behavior on social media platforms and generating statistical results for future strategies. With its customizable and flexible features, Brandwatch is considered user-friendly for managers, analysts, and data geeks alike, making it a premier tool for understanding the statistical underbelly of the digital landscape in the PR and marketing industry.

Another popular product in the realm of social media management is Falcon.io. This versatile tool is highly regarded for its functionality in several key areas, including social media management, publishing, community management, social listening, and content measurement. Users have found Falcon.io especially useful for gaining insights into target audiences, managing and distributing social media content, monitoring social media buzz and sentiment around keywords, as well as optimizing ad spend based on trend analysis. The platform also enables users to consolidate scheduling and community management tasks across multiple channels. Additionally, Falcon.io provides unique target audience sets from listening query results, allowing users to run strong advertising campaigns on Facebook. Overall, Falcon.io has proven to be a valuable resource for businesses looking to enhance their social media presence and engagement with their target audiences.

Users frequently recommend Brandwatch for the following reasons:

  1. Exceptional Customer Service and Platform: Users speak highly of Brandwatch's customer service and platform, emphasizing its interactive and intelligent nature. They appreciate the tool's ability to provide great data visualization for analytical thinking.

  2. Extensive Research Capabilities: Users suggest utilizing Brandwatch for brand, consumer, and industry research purposes. They find it to be a valuable tool for effectively recording and analyzing comments and tweets.

  3. Strong Support and Onboarding Process: Users praise the reliable support provided by Brandwatch's team. The excellent support and customer success management are particularly appreciated. During onboarding, users recommend carefully considering the tagging schema and allocating sufficient time to learn the platform thoroughly, as initial intimidation gives way to an enjoyable experience with practice.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-15 of 15)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Gary Wilcox | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
In an educational environment, I teach a Social Media course in which we use Brandwatch to track salient topics of interest to our projects. We currently have a query running capturing information about our academic competitors. In our class sessions students present weekly findings and discuss the results of the week.

In a research environment, I use Brandwatch to collect textual data I use in academic publications. I use the basic Dashboards offered in Brandwatch and then extract the textual data for use in SAS Text Miner. I have had excellent success with this combination of software tools.
  • Filters textual data
  • provides excellent options in terms of dashboards
  • very efficient and timely data downloads
  • quick response from the support team
  • I would like to have larger data downloads per day. Our unit is limited to 50K lines of data per day.
  • I would like to see a more comprehensive historical data pull
Brandwatch is a great listening tool. I have used other similar systems and now believe I have found the most comprehensive, easy-to-use tool to retrieve consumers messages, attitudes, and emotions.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It's used by a single department - social media monitoring team. It solves the issue of monitoring and understanding social media buzz and sentiment around keywords and topics of interest. We typically use the tool to identify sentiment and related keywords associated with a brand during and after campaigns that are run.
  • Crimson is a pioneer in applying the supervised machine learning algorithms for sentiment classification. Hence the sentiment engine is robust.
  • I personally like the topic wheels that show the overarching topics and sub topics in an easy to understand wheel representation.
  • I also like the word associations network graph that it provides for top keywords. Very informative and engaging graph.
  • Currently the sentiment classifier has a minimum number of mentions that need to be tagged initially for training the tool on the desired classification. But this is tedious when we have lots of sentiment or categories. For ad hoc analysis use, we need a simpler system to see basic sentiment analysis.
  • I suggest that the creation and duplication of dashboards are not geared for repeated usage over time. It is not flexible enough to be shared to other users etc.
  • Data sources need to be expanded from the current offering.
It is well suited for large studies that have lots of time for analysis. Its features are very engaging in bringing out keyword associations and topical relations. It is not suited for small ad-hoc studies.
Ravindra Sahu | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The Brandwatch tool is used to generate consumer insights using the social data for clients, as a service company we provide listening service to clients using the Brandwatch tool. The tool is majorly used by the research and HR department for the client as well and employee hiring purposes. The features and UI helps us to understand the consumer behaviors and provide the same insight to clients.
  • It helps to create Consumer Insight report
  • It helps to create Influencer Analysis report
  • It helps to create Campaign Analysis report and see the performance of the campaign
  • Image recognition features
  • Speech Analysis features
  • Attractive wordcloud
It is best suited for companies that have huge data because of the tool efficiency. Brandwatch can change the large data into graphs in minutes, and it takes very less loading time. The tool is used to creating Influencer analysis, campaign analysis, and consumer insight report in one click.
The tool is also user-friendly with an easy boolean logic feature. The tool is less appropriate for post scheduling.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Currently used as the main reporting tool for board and senior leaders on understanding social media commentary and exposure the business has. Helping to support some UR and thematic research, Brandwatch helps to steer high level product design strategies and communications direction when talking about overall brand, overall user propensity to purchase.
  • Very detailed in its thematic and keyword based searches.
  • The ability to crease multiple levels to predefined filtering allows for cleaner results.
  • Too comprehensive means it is more of a reporting tool than an investigations tool.
  • The filtering defaults are often misused to predefine keyword filtering... how can we be sure users always use the same keywords.
Albeit a complex interface and very fiddly to get to an end result, the use of presentation graphics, the ability to filter properly and the options within the design and distribution of the boards means that Brandwatch is used at the highest level in our organisation. Alternatives to Brandwatch are used but it is the output that gives Brandwatch the edge.
October 15, 2019

Wouldn't recommend it

Kenji Onozawa | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Across our company, it was mostly used in marketing and social care (who was responsible for the brand listening within our organization).

The main uses for Brandwatch within our company were as follows:
  • Monthly social channel performance reporting.
  • Brand protection.
  • Campaign reporting (mainly hashtag tracking).
  • Announcement reporting.
  • Social listening.
  • Campaign reporting.
  • Manipulation of the data (visually).
  • The learning curve is steep.
  • Price tag.
  • Wasn't able to pull all the metrics our organization needed.
I think among the enterprise-level listening suites, Brandwatch is probably among the best. With that said, for the average marketer, it's still too confusing to set up and get going without the help of their support managers (as compared to something like Sprinklr). More often than not, our team would need to contact them to get the dashboards set up the way we needed as it was simply too difficult to do so on our own.

I think what it did well was at a high level being able to get the social listening metrics we needed (with a few caveats) and being able to alert us when there was a situation on social we needed to be made aware of (so we could get ahead of it). Where it really faltered was in the social channel post reporting as it wasn't able to gather some of the data our team required. As a result, we'd need to go into the native platforms to generate post performance metrics, which defeated the point of us having a tool like Brandwatch in the first place.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Falcon.io provides many similar functionalities as every other social media management platform. As an agency that services many clients, we are always looking for new tools that can enable us to offer unique services and features to them. We found one such feature within Falcon.io that allowed us to extract unique target audience sets from our listening query results. This unique and powerful functionality allowed us to run strong advertising campaigns on Facebook that managed to achieve some of the best CPC and CPM post rates we've seen compared to our regular targeted ads.
  • Very nice UX: The interface is quite easy and intuitive
  • Strong listening module: You can run search queries and get results as good as some of the top listening platforms provide
  • Cross-platform profiling: We were able to detect our fans and followers profiles across multiple social media platforms and document a clear history of our interactions and engagement with them
  • Some of our measurement metrics are predefined, and you would need to extract the raw data and calculate new or other metrics such as engagement rates (based on reach)
  • Can be quite pricy, especially compared to other cheaper solutions that can provide some of the basic functionalities for fraction of the price
Falcon.io provides a set of functionalities that cover a wide spectrum of services that would normally be required by any social media community manager and analyst. In addition, it has a few unique features that you wouldn't find in other platforms, and we would highly recommend signing up with Falcon.io if those functionalities are what you are seeking.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Union Metrics has proved to be a valuable tool to pull snapshot reports of activity related to our company on Twitter, being able to gather data to allow us to see the number of Tweets, potential impressions, sentiment, retweets (RT's), and the top Tweets related to a given subject. While the tool does allow basic information for your owned Instagram and Facebook pages, we use it almost exclusively to report on Twitter.
  • The ability to pull quick and graphically pleasing reports to distribute to your team to gauge the impact of a particular topic on Twitter.
  • The ability to track a number of keywords on Twitter over an extended period of a time.
  • An easy way to find the top contributors related to specific topics.
  • While this may be down to limitations with the API, it would be great to determine an accurate number for impressions generated by Tweets related to specific subjects, rather than a total potential number.
  • Sentiment analysis could be improved to get a more accurate read, however this is a limitation with almost all social listening platforms.
  • It would be great if it were possible to track a number of public Facebook pages in a similar manner as to what is available on Twitter.
It is a fairly powerful and easy-to-use tool at a very affordable price. We use it on a daily basis and get amazing value out of the insights we are able to obtain. The ability to quickly produce and export reports allows us to easily get an idea of how specific conversations are unrolling on Twitter.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Falcon is being used by our organic social team to consolidate scheduling and community management. It's a very robust tool that allows us to organize social effort across multiple stakeholders.
  • Bulk upload for FB and TW. We post 4-5 times per day, per channel in some cases.
  • Scheduling. Very convenient to see everything aggregated into a calendar view.
  • Community management. Engage is probably one of the strongest modules. It aggregates everything from all channels.
  • Better support for Instagram community management. We'd like to be able to reply directly to comments.
  • Instagram bulk upload. This is a big channel for us, so we'd love to be able to bulk upload. It would save us a lot of time.
  • Platform speed. Occasional lag, especially in Engage.
Really great for consolidating and reviewing schedule across channels and for community management. Not great for managing several communities managers in terms of accountability and performance tracking.
Jimmy Mack | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Cerner uses Crimson Hexagon to monitor brand mentions in the social media space. It is used to monitor share of voice against key competitors, sentiment of social media coverage, trending topics within the health care information technology space, and more. It was used to generate key reports that went up to senior level executives, including the President of the company.
  • Drills down to specifics of what is being discussed on social media
  • Very robust set of analytics tools
  • Topic wheels are extremely useful for identifying trending topics
  • It is a very costly tool
  • The pricing packages are not the most intuitive to understand when going through the contract process
  • The user interface could be improved to allow for more efficient usage
If you need to discover what topics may be trending in the social media space to identify what your target audiences want to hear from you, then Crimson Hexagon is a great tool. You can use the analytics widgets to drill down to specifics about what your audience is talking about, which enables you to develop content they want to consume.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Crimson Hexagon allows users to save all relevant data visualizations and metrics into a shared workspace that can be quickly transformed into a holistic report.
  • Solid visualizations and reporting capabilities
  • Shared workspaces to collaborate on social listening reports
  • Share of voice studies among brands' competitive sets
  • Word clouds and topic waves are often difficult to generate if there isn't enough conversation volume
  • Visuals for share of voice comparisons are often hard to interpret
Crimson Hexagon is ideal for social listening, crisis communications and share of voice studies versus competitor brands. Crimson Hexagon could improve in sentiment analysis as it often skews all commentary to "neutral" without much context.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Crimson Hexagon lets us see what people are saying about things in their own words. This allows the opportunity to assess them in ways that other records just don't. A real insight into real people.
  • Boolean queries let you fully customize.
  • Multi-language analytics.
  • The geography description is very vague.
Crimson Hexagon is great for getting a sense of what's being said.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Brandwatch Analytics was used only by the marketing department and addressed monitoring volume and sentiment on social channels.
  • Very clickable - easy to navigate
  • Easy to compile dashboards
  • Customize queries
  • Query building too complicated
  • Didn't pull in enough data
  • Hard to measure sentiment
Brandwatch Analytics is well suited for those who know how to build complex queries. During the selection process, ask about query building and source of data.
Ari Lightman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Brandwatch as a discovery and measurement tool within projects and classes dealing with social analysis at Carnegie Mellon University. Students and faculty use Brandwatch to asses how market segments are engaged with brands, political and societal trends across the social space, and how communities engage and respond with organizations. We view Brandwatch as a critical piece in student development and learning and couldn't be happier in partnering with them..
  • Powerful querying capabilities with the ability to filter based on several factors
  • Data visualization for easy trend spotting and benchmarking capability
  • Sentiment mapping to identify how brands and content are perceived across channels
  • Easy to understand and use interface
  • Great customer support and accessible online help resources
  • Industry specific content and examples
  • Integration into structured CRM applications
Brandwatch is one of the best tools for research and analysis in that it lets you go very specific on individual querying to weed out all the noise from the social web.
Ben Donkor | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
One of the main problems I've been able to solve with the help of Brandwatch is correlation - so what you had spike in mentions last week? What caused it? So what you had a lot of mentions from a particular forum, more than usual? What caused that? Thanks to annotation and the ability to plot various metrics on the flexible Brandwatch graphs, I can easily identify what correlates and what causes spikes and/or dips, even before I export the data to Excel for a deep-dive. In fact, one of the benefits of Brandwatch is that, while I can keep some of the dashboards with basic and self-explanatory graphs based on the audience, I can also keep my "super dashboards" with all the metrics and widgets I need, and I can do all of my deep dives right from the dashboard. This leads me to the next problem I was able to solve thanks to Brandwatch - showing my various stakeholders that social listening (and social analytics in general) isn't daunting, it isn't boring, and just because it's often portrayed in an Excel spreadsheet it doesn't mean it's too scary for the business to appreciate. Brandwatch is so customisable and flexible that it's manager-friendly, analyst-friendly, data geek-friendly etc.
  • Brandwatch is very flexible, customisable, it's great for beginners and it appeases the advanced users who are always looking for more and more data
  • Brandwatch is the tool with the highest number of supported Boolean queries - something to keep in mind if you want to build really flexible and accurate social listening queries.
  • Brandwatch is open - with open APIs, you can integrate it with other applications that you may already have (e.g. Hootsuite, so you can monitor mentions and engage with them).
  • Brandwatch isn't stagnant - the platform is constantly updated, every 2 weeks, so I'm reassured that I'm with a solution that moves at the pace of digital marketing.
  • I've used Brandwatch for quite a while, and I have to say that I'm thoroughly satisfied with it. However, if I have to point out a "weakness", I'd say the lack of an app. It would be great to have a view of mentions and analytics on-the-go, via an app. Having said that, it's not a big deal-breaker - I've tried using Brandwatch on my phone and a few more times on my tablet and it works just fine.
One of the several areas where Brandwatch shines is how refined you can get your Boolean queries to be - as it's the tool that supports the most Boolean queries out there, I've been able to create really accurate and refined queries, and the better the queries, the better the results you get out of the tool. The added preview option also helps me to see if the query will work even before I save it. In other words, Brandwatch is a perfectionist's dream come true.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
As a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University, I used Brandwatch for my project with Expedia Inc. The target was to recognize customer behavior on various social media platforms before and after using services from Expedia and compare it with competitors. Brandwatch also helped in generating a statistical result that was used to devise future strategies.
  • Twitter Integration
  • Statistical Summary and sentiments
  • Removal of certain keywords from search queries
  • Some results are fuzzy
  • Most sentiments are considered neutral. There should be a clear distinction between positive and negative
  • Integration with other social media especially picture oriented like Instagram
Most suitable to generate statistical information and comparisons. I like how it generates relative results for query. However, I found results fuzzy sometimes.
Return to navigation