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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…

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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 …
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Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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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
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Product Demos

Take your Brandwatch data anywhere: The power of the API

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Brandwatch is... More Simple to Use

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Brandwatch has... More Filters

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Social Media: Measurement and Reporting

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Brandwatch has... More Data Quality

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Brandwatch Experts: 1. Sentiment Analysis

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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

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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%
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(149)

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

(1-25 of 25)
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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.
James Arnold | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We are engaging with Brandwatch on two fronts. First, to inform us globally on our industry while also informing us on various niches. That information allows us to be smarter and also surprise our internal and external clients with business-relevant information. Secondly, we use it as insurance. Are there conversations going on that we need to know about instantly.
  • Media coverage database.
  • On-ramping from zero to action.
  • Reporting.
  • More reporting template options.
  • More alerting options.
The tool is very powerful and can serve just about any size of brand. You need to have a few people dedicated to using it though to make it powerful. Given the cost of it, you will want to make sure those people are engaged at least at a mid level in the company to know how to best search. It does not have a low cost, so it might not work for many smaller businesses.
Gavin Bigelow | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Initially a listening tool for our social team to better understand the audiences they could tap into, Brandwatch Consumer Research eventually became a staple for tracking and reporting for our Influencer, Product Marketing, Customer Service, and Performance Marketing teams. For the social teams, it became both an analytics tool and a means to track and rapidly implement consumer feedback on social marketing campaigns, promoting social channel growth and an increase in positive sentiment for the brand across various social channels. Our Influencer team was able to track and report on the interactions they got from various signed personalities while monitoring brand mentions across the web, allowing them to find and reach out to new potential influencers for the brand. The Product and Performance marketing teams made great use of all the data provided by various dashboards built within the platform to track and report live campaigns, allowing them to implement changes and improvements to future campaigns faster. The Customer Service team and Product Marketing team both highly benefited from Brandwatch's sentiment tracking tools, allowing both teams to track and report on key topics across multiple KPIs.
  • Segmentation
  • High Customization
  • Huge Data Source
  • Access to Historic Data
  • Onboarding
  • Exporting Dashboards
  • Automated Exports
Brandwatch Consumer Research is an excellent tool for better understanding your global audience while providing your teams the tools to deep-dive down to a specific list of individual users. The real value of the tool comes from its advanced customization options. With a little time and creativity, you can segment any data to suit almost any purpose, allowing you to create some truly deep reports and insights into the various user data you are looking into. If you are looking to dive into the nitty-gritty of your audience while maintaining the functionality to create easy to understand reports Brandwatch is a wonderful platform to look into.
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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our marketing department currently uses Union Metrics to track potential and actual metrics for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for a large client with a social audience of 2M+. Union Metrics fills the gap of having to pull top performing posts individually in each platform. The snapshot makes it easy for our client to understand what’s working.
  • Topic tracking is easy to set up and starts pulling fairly quickly. While the data is only for Twitter, it’s easy to find influencers talking about your topic.
  • The overview of metrics per platform is incredibly helpful, and the simplicity of what you're looking at makes it easy for a non-savvy client to grasp.
  • Understanding top contributors and hashtags about your brand helps inform strategy or how to adjust content. For example, our brand's top contributors were not who we wanted to be associated with our posts, so we adjusted our language.
  • More platform integration. I would love for Union Metrics to be a “one stop shop” but LinkedIn and YouTube are not available to track.
If you’re looking to track metrics and easily export so they are client ready, Union Metrics is an excellent and trustworthy tool. If you need to dig deeper with individual posts or nitty-gritty analytics, pulling directly from the platform will still be the best course of action.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We currently use Brandwatch for competitive analysis and market research for new business pitches. It is mainly used by our digital department but provides insights used by our entire organization.
  • Sentiment analysis.
  • Social mentions.
  • Social influencers.
  • Pulling historical information.
  • Pulling information evenly across online channels.
  • Identifying negative comments vs positive comments.
I think Brandwatch is good for analyzing online conversations around broad topics. However, I think for more niche topics there is a lot of clean-up that needs to be done in the mentions and data pulled.
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.
Tegan Jenner | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Brandwatch is used by our media and data team at my company. But reports and findings generated through Brandwatch are shared with our entire office and externally to clients.

Some of the main areas we use Brandwatch for are: trend tracking, organic follower tracking (FB, IG, and TW), estimating share of voice, Twitter custom audiences using the Audiences tool, sentiment tracking, Brand health monitoring, competitor conversation tracking.
  • 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.
  • Query building learning curve. To get the most out of query set up, using the Query Editor is best, but learning the nuances of this process can be hard if you don't consider yourself to be very tech-savvy.
  • It would be nice if widget color schemes were adjustable so graphs could be catered to specific report styles. Our company aesthetic doesn't really match with the rainbow-colored widgets created by Brandwatch, so sometimes they stand out in a bad way in our reports.
  • I know this is something they are working on, but the current AI classification and learning abilities are limited (as of Oct. 2019). Part of their road-map with their Crimson Hexagon acquisition is to incorporate smarter classification and AI to help filter out irrelevant mentions.
  • Sentiment classification is unreliable sometimes depending on the subject matter. If a user is being funny or sarcastic in a mention, the sentiment algorithm gets really tripped up.
Brandwatch has been exceptionally helpful when it comes to new business pitches. If we are looking into pitching a client that is in a new sector/field compared to our other clients, we use Brandwatch to pull in user data to get a feel for trends and discussion topics in the sector. Clients really appreciate any insights we can bring to our pitches -- especially when they are supported by actual user data that we've collected through Brandwatch.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
For modern PR, having a pulse on social conversation is a must. We use it to monitor conversation on topics, brands, competitors, and to identify trends and audiences that can inform both strategic planning and rapid-response. In practice, the analytics team does most of the work in the platform, but there are some generalists who are comfortable doing basic to intermediate tasks.
  • Slices and dices data by different keyword sets and visualizes it however you need it
  • Doesn't limit the number of queries
  • Allows for highly customized dashboards
  • Makes it easy to limit access based on user logins
  • 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
Brandwatch is great for ongoing monitoring using defined categories. It's brilliant at segmenting and displaying data how you need it, especially when you know what data you need and how you need to see it. It's not the best when you don't quite know what you're looking for, and when time matters - there aren't many good tools for quickly applying filters or using AI to identify patterns, though that's getting better as they continue to merge Crimson Hexagon technology, so I'd continue to watch this space.
Lainey Graham | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Falcon.io is currently being used by the content marketing team and customer service to coordinate and publish content to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and to answer customer direct messages. It is also used by our content marketing team to gather metrics and determine the success of various content pieces and campaigns.
  • The interface is well-organized and makes the user experience very smooth.
  • Organizes content well with the publishing feature. You can easily see when different posts are scheduled and where you have holes.
  • Falcon aggregates data well in their metrics section, although they only provide data you can get from the platform reports. It is nice to have it all in one place so to speak.
  • Falcon.io does not show the conversations that occur between customers and your chatbot, which is a big issue for our company as messenger marketing becomes a more profitable part of our marketing efforts.
  • Falcon.io will often not publish posts that don't meet certain niche creative requirements of different social platforms. It would be helpful if they provided an error while you were creating the post rather than failing to publish later.
  • Falcon.io does not currently post to Instagram stories. This is a capability that they need to compete in their space.
Falcon is well-suited for organizing your social media content and scheduling it beforehand, especially if you have multiple accounts you need to schedule content for. However, posts will frequently fail to be posted because the creative will not meet a specific requirement of a social platform. Falcon.io needs to provide an error prior to allowing the content creator to schedule the post because this creates double work when you have to go back and re-create posts. It is well-suited to assigning team members direct messages, but not quite as well-suited as Zendesk is to this task since Zendesk uses a ticketing system which is easier to keep up with.
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.
Ravinshu Saneja | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
We use it as an agency for other brands in India. The whole organisation uses it, and in fact, most of our enterprise clients use Brandwatch services too. Based on the experience with clients and users of Brandwatch, the best use case of Brandwatch involved peer-benchmarking. Most companies use it to listen to what's happening on the internet about their peers. Why are they being liked or disliked? Bucketing such conversations gives them insights on what to improve on and what to focus more on. Other business problems Brandwatch takes care of include marketing campaign analytics, net sentiment, PR coverage, and brand health.
  • Brandwatch is great with bulk changes in mentions, which I believe is also a USP as I haven't seen any tool do that (I have checked out many).
  • You can bulk tag, change sentiment, add rules, add categories etc. to mentions.
  • From tagging and rules comes good analysis of mentions. Once categorised, you'd be able to understand what are people taking the most about - in a negative or a positive way. Say a telecom company wants to know why people don't like my services - is it the network, or customer service or something else. Do people from a particular city complaint a lot?
  • Brandwatch also does a good job at capturing a huge amount of mentions from 90M+ websites. That's 2x or 3x more in some cases than the few leading enterprise listening software.
  • It also provides the maximum number of metadata per mention thus giving maximum scope of slicing the data and analysing in different ways.
  • I feel Brandwatch needs to add more sources with proper API integrations. The integrations are limited to Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. While Twitter gets great coverage, Facebook and Instagram do not (considering the recent policy changes, coverage has been limited). While it does capture 90M+ other sites which include most of the other social media sites such as Youtube, I feel an integration with such sites can get more analytics around usage data such as video viewing times, view growth on Youtube.
  • While they have a lot of insights already, I feel a few word clouds could have been done differently as well, such as word connections. Also, more accurate auto-categorisation of mentions where manual rule adding isn't needed.
  • E-commerce review coverage (Amazon etc.) should be included.
In any large enterprise use case of listening to social media, Brandwatch Analytics is very well suited. For any small-medium enterprise trying to listen to social media, just for knowing your social media reach, I feel there exists cheaper tools and to save cost, Brandwatch might not be needed. Brands can upgrade to Brandwatch when they need enterprise level insights from social media mentions. Also, you might not want it if you just want PR tracking.
Jarad Matula, MBA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is being used by the Media Department currently. It provides insights into both existing clients and the performance of their campaigns. We use it to measure Share of Voice, Brand Sentiment, and for customer insights on a monthly basis. We also use it as part of a "social audit" we perform for new clients to better acquaint our client on the social landscape and where they stand in it.

In addition, we also use it for research for new business development. This enables us to come up with insights into a potential client's business before making a deal, and enables us to know what type of programs would benefit the company the most, based on what's happening in the market.
  • The breadth of the data it captures is impressive, and you are only limited in the tool by your own knowledge of how to use the system. Therefore, if you know how to create smart, tightly structured queries, how to create smart rules to help save manual search and filing, already have a set of keywords to plug in to your query, and know how to use the more advanced chart visualizations beyond the stock ones they provide, you should be in great shape.
  • The range of historical data, as well as the ability to access it in detail is a definite plus that puts them above competitors if you're looking for long-term historical trends.
  • The visuals are basic, but look nice, and the ability to export most of the graphs and charts is very useful when putting together presentations.
  • Depending on your prior knowledge, there could be a steep learning curve. Don't get me wrong, their customer service/account management is fantastic-- they take you through an initial training and are happy to answer any questions you have, but it's hard to articulate what you don't know, just starting out, so there's things I'm only learning how to do after a year of using the tool. I like to think of it as a very power shell/big data source. If you know exactly what data you're looking for and already have the necessary keywords to build a query, you can do great things. If not, it will be an uphill struggle at times.
  • Many of its competitors have "quick search" type functions that are great for new business pitches or other situations where you're starting from square 1, while Brandwatch does not in its basic product and offers it as a separate product for additional fee.
  • While the visualizations are serviceable, they are quite basic don't allow flexibility, so many times I end up exporting the data and creating my own in other tools.
  • Intelligence on identifying sentiment is lacking without your own rules, training it, etc. I spend a fair amount of time re-categorizing mis-filed sentiment on posts.

Brandwatch is a great tool for social listening, especially if you already have experience with query building (using Boolean logic, are familiar with Operators, etc.), but sometimes things feel like they're harder than they need to be. Considering it's one of the most expensive products in its category, I would expect more features and functionality right out of the box, and to be far less DIY. And the product keeps adding new features all the time, so I think they're on the right track and only getting better, but still have some gaps.

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.

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
Brandwatch Analytics is being used across multiple business units within our agency. This includes account teams for clients for which we are the social AOR, as well as by agency resources that are shared by multiple business units for project (non-retainer) work, new business, etc. We also address multiple business problems with the platform. Some of these include analytics on client owned social platforms, content analysis, competitive set tracking, social listening, hashtag or campaign monitoring, research and planning, etc.
  • Twitter coverage is very strong, which provides for accurate data and flexible measurement capabilities. Data sets include follower count, following count, replies, and retweets which sample data points that are not always available in other platform unless you are authorized as the owner of the channel.
  • The entire platform is robust yet flexible. There are advanced Boolean operators that can be used to create complex queries. Then, when ready to analyze the data, the dashboards provide an almost endless way of filtering, categorizing, tagging, drilling down into, slicing, and dicing the data however you need to see it to answer your business problem.
  • Customer service has always been timely and interactions are positive. They can usually solve a problem or at least give you a response to let you know they are working on an issue well within 24 hours.
  • Instagram data coverage is not very strong. Though there are industry-wide hurdles in tracking data on Instagram, there are competitors that have proven more accurate than Brandwatch.
  • Many larger, more broad queries return a lot of junk or spam posts. Customer service can help with filtering these out with common "NOT" operator phrases. However, some competitors do a better job on the back end to make sure you never see as much as the spam to begin with.
  • Monthly data limits are a con if your work requires a lot of ad hoc projects and it's hard to project the monthly volume you will need.
From my experience with multiple social listening tools, Brandwatch Analytics strikes a decent balance in measurement and analysis. Many other tools only address one of these needs. Measurement in the sense that they provide specific data points (likes, comments, shares, follower count, etc.), and analysis in the sense that you can custom define trends within your topic (with tags and categories), filter by dozens of different variables, and can drill down to explain the "why?".
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Crimson Hexagon is being used as a tool to extract social listening insights to inform strategy and creative. We also use the tool to measure campaign success based on conversation insights. The tool is solely used by the planning/strategy department of the agency.
  • Clearly presenting the most important metrics and information
  • Capabilities of slicing the data up however you choose
  • I like the ability to easily change the date range
  • I would like to see a single metric for sentiment (e.g., net sentiment)
I would recommend this tool to anyone working in the industry looking to improve their social listening insights.
February 15, 2016

Crimson for Advertisers

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Crimson Hexagon to do real time and past social monitoring for our clients. Our whole planning department has been trained and is using the tool. It helps us address share of voice within our clients and their competitors. Im addition to share of voice, it helps us to gather audience insights about current and potential customers.
  • Allows us to use firehose for Twitter in the past.
  • Helps us discern audience affinities and create custom audiences.
  • Also has a smaller social account monitoring tool that can be used.
  • You can only set up a finite number of searches within the platform. If you hit the limit you have to delete one to make another.
It is great for look into the past for trends. It is less useful for real-time monitoring. For example if you were hosting a war room for a Super Bowl spot that was airing and wanted to track real-time response, you'd want to use a tool that refreshes quicker. Also their social platform section could use some more building out.
Fiona Roddis | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Brandwatch Analytics as part of our education program, both with clients and graduates to illustrate what's possible with social listening and brand monitoring.
  • Cross platform monitoring including social media.
  • It's a very powerful tool that allows us to gain deeper insights into brands and organisations.
  • Detailed help and tips when setting up projects/queries as well as fantastic customer support from the team.
  • Query structure is flexible allowing us to create a range of queries from general to very complex and specific.
  • Introduce a small business package that's more financially viable for startups/entrepreneurs or graduates.
  • Increase social media platform coverage.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
As we're an outsourcing company we've been using Crimson Hexagon to provide market intelligence allowing us to open doors with potential new clients. We currently use it for a client to help them expand their reach to individuals who are victims of fraud and may need advice. We find people to contact on Twitter and then signpost them to the client's service. Currently it's only being used by sales and marketing, as well as the customer service teams in our contact centres.
  • Crimson is really good at performing complex boolean searches to bring back conversations about a particular topic.
  • Its reports are quick and easy to understand as well as being visually appealing.
  • Its ability to train examples into categories by giving it best match examples allows you to analyse a lot of data quite quickly.
  • I've noticed that when running off reports to PowerPoint presentations, the software sometimes glitches and doesn't include every element that you initially included.
  • Its quite complicated to get to grips with the advanced features such as training opinion monitors.
  • It would be great if Crimson could geolocate by IP rather than location setting on Twitter.
The questions I would ask is how big is your brand or client? If you have high volumes of conversation around your brand or sector then this could well be the product for you.

If you are a smaller entity I'd suggest looking elsewhere as it's not very good at dealing with low volume conversation.
Matthew Watkins | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We implement monitoring solutions for leading consumer brands. We provide managed solutions providing data at a top management level, but making sure that important indications filter down. Brandwatch monitoring provides us with critical marketing intelligence including performance indicators, threats, concerns, opportunities and competitor benchmarks. Monitoring allows clients to intercept and evaluate the conversations regarding their brand. It provides key information for improving brand sentiment, share of voice, customer service and a host of other issues.
  • Groups similar mentions to assist in competitive / marketing intelligence.
  • Social media management. Extend the network of content management.
  • Customer service. Allows teamwork on outstanding issues. Mentions can be assigned to individual users.
  • Facilitates calculation of ROI from marketing campaigns.
  • Sector wide listening. Provides a company with key industry benchmarks.
  • A Mobile version would be exceptional.
Brandwatch is appropriate in any context where there is a relatively high volume of open conversations. Important to ask information about the (advanced) query settings that can make all the difference to the quality of your results.

Marshall Sponder | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I have my students working with internship projects this semester and it is an excellent platform for monitoring online reputation and story amplification. Brandwatch also implemented various roles and permission with make it easier to control access and mention usage. The issues that Brandwatch addresses is how to make sense of what is being said online about the subject of an analysis - Brandwatch's superior text categorization and tagging tools (which I compare with a Cuisinart) make it an excellent platform to invest in reusable queries revolving around industry and use case monitoring.
  • Finding conversations and tagging, categories and rulesets
  • Connecting Social Media Monitoring to SEO via API access to MOZrank, Compete, and providing social impact scores on each piece of content.
  • Demographic profiling via Twitter, can do some interesting comparisons on the fly which might be hard to do with several of its competitor platforms.
  • Theme surfacing via Text Analytics is something that is better with Brandwatch than most of the other platforms I have worked with, when it is offered, at all.
  • Brandwatch now monitors Facebook and Twitter owned media - this is more than most platforms Brandwatch is competing with does.
  • Maybe its just the server my instance is running on, but query execution is slower than ideal
  • I want to set more than 10 influencers to show up in the Author dashboard, but aren't quite sure how to do that, if it's possible.
  • The Geolocation features Brandwatch introduced a few years ago are helpful, and it would be nice if they extended it to their output, not just the input, currently they just show regional data for the most part, not city or lat/long coordinates.
  • Brandwatch ought to develop a mobile app, just like Google Analytics and Radian6 has.
Well, there's nothing specifically bad to say about Brandwatch - its all good. What I have mentioned in my speaking engagements and teaching is that text analytics tools that are best on keywords have strengths and some obvious weaknesses. One of the issues with all tools that use keywords for social media monitoring is that people often don't use the keywords we are monitoring for, using others, or no keywords at all.
Phil Butler | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
As a technology, travel, and news journalist, or a PR and marketing professional, I've utilized many tools to capture the relevance and value of social media over the years. At Pamil Visions Public Relations, and via our efforts at Argophilia and Argo Travel News, our people have found Brandwatch the premier tool for showing the statistical underbelly of the digital landscape. Whether we need to report to hotel clients on media mentions, or if I personally need to find a key metric for a news story, Brandwatch solves for "X" in most cases. The point of pain Brandwatch easily solves is turning intricate and complex social interaction, Big Data, and difficult to explain concepts into relative child's play. Brandwatch is a tool every business person interested in digital must have.
  • Brandwatch mitigates creating simple to understand answers from highly complex social metrics - face it, outputting a chart to explain social tone is just amazing
  • When I was asked to show the "heat" of mentions on the subject of the Ukraine for Russia Today, Brandwatch simplified the task of comparing the sentiment toward Russia's part, Ukraine, and the rest of the west. Social media plays a huge role in PR and politics these days.
  • A hotel recently asked us to show the ROI of PR, something public relations professionals have wrestled with for decades. Brandwatch helped me clearly represent how a "test" PR campaign resulted in a massive branding plus for a singled out hotel chain versus its competitors. I know of no other metrics driven tool that has been able to so easily accomplish this.
  • Frequently we're asked to evaluate one hotels chain's competition for their social and digital imminence. Businesses want to stay ahead of the competition, obviously. Brandwatch is the perfect comparative tool to help owners eclipse their competing hotels.
  • The only real weakness I can find in the Brandwatch tool set is the learning curve for super-wired company professionals like my team. That said, the complexities and uses of Brandwatch, while extensive, end up being far more feasible for uptake than the competitive ones. I'd also commend the team at Brandwatch for assisting at every level. I can't tell you how many times they've helped me create campaigns.
In general Brandwatch can be utilized by any business or organization to make a "window" into their digital ecosystem. That said, very small companies may be pressed for cost as is always the case. Those companies intent on growth, and on using the tools that promote it, are perfect candidates for Brandwatch.
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.
Adam Connell | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I use Brandwatch across my entire organization. We use it to monitor brand mentions and that of our competitors. We have some VERY big competitors and Brandwatch has been instrumental in gauging how strong our brand is in comparison to competitors.

  • Identifying social reach of competitors - do you know how much reach your competitors have? What about how many social mentions they get in a given day? Most people have no idea but I can see the exact percentage of the social web my brand takes up in comparison to its competitors. This is invaluable in discovering how effective my brand is, what's working for competitors and what's working for us.
  • Deep social listening - do you know what your customers/readers are saying about your brand? Most of my brands competitors don't know this so using Brandwatch to monitor for brand mentions gives us a huge advantage. We can also respond to mentions within the tool in most situations - great for reputation management.
  • Supporting additional social networks - what Brandwatch supports now is great, but the more the merrier.
  • Ease of adding queries - there is a learning curve involved when using Brandwatch but then again that's the way it should be because it's an enterprise level tool so it's packed with functionality. There are easier to use tools but they don't have nowhere near as many features and the complexity of queries adds another dimension entirely. That said, they have improved things significantly so it's now much easier than it was and their team are always very helpful in offering support.
Consider whether you have the time to invest in using a tool like this. You need the time to learn how to use Brandwatch and the time to put the data to use. The Brandwatch team is very helpful so you can easily get support. It's not the cheapest tool but you really get what you pay for. I've used budget tools and they just aren't as effective (and support isn't there when you need it).
Brandwatch is an incredible tool to monitor social mentions, pick up on potential marketing opportunities, identify what's working for your competitors and understand the reach of competitors.

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • Brandwatch compiles social media posts in a concise and coherent manner that makes it easy to navigate hundreds of individual messages.
  • Brandwatch makes it easy to filter results based on platform and export the results to Excel for further analysis. This function is essential for my use of the product and enables to to search for targeted phrases and keywords across social media outlets.
  • Brandwatch gives detailed information about social media users right in the platform. There is no need to go to a specific Twitter or Facebook URL when a user's info is posted within the Brandwatch system.
  • Personally I preferred the old Brandwatch layout to the current one. I liked the horizontal layout with the functionality across the top of the page.
  • I would like to see a find function within social media results. Finding individual phrases and words within Brandwatch results would enable me to avoid exporting data into a spreadsheet. This is not a large issue for me, just something that would make my work easier.
  • I would like to see Brandwatch use infinite scrolling so all results could come up on one page.
It is very well suited to social media analysis, which is the only aspect of the product I have used. Projects that look at a large number of Facebook and Twitter posts can benefit from Brandwatch's offering. It might be less appropriate for targeting highly specific Tweets, but it is great for a landscape analysis.
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