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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 Small Businesses (1-50 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

(1-10 of 10)
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Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It helps us a lot in monitoring the brand on social networks, as well as getting to know our target audiences better. It is a very professional tool that allows a great depth of analysis and at a commercial level it is useful to better target messages and content strategies on social channels.It allows you to confuse queries in a simple and highly customizable way.
  • Improve the customer experience
  • The connection via API is very good
  • Its flexibility and scalability adapts to all types of organizations
  • The analysis and monitoring of influencers
  • Sentiment analysis using AI
  • Higher level of audience data filtering
It is very appropriate for social media teams that develop a very professional and highly detailed work, who want to make their social media strategies profitable.It is not appropriate for companies that are not serious about social channels and do not want to invest in top tools.Social media teams are better with Brandwatch
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.
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.
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.

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.
November 13, 2014

Brandwatch Rocks My World

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I use Brandwatch to discover who is saying what about a certain product or service and on which social media channels. And also if the sentiment is positive or negative. With the information I gather it enables me to plan future content and possible publishing sites. Other uses are identifying influencers and discovering historical data.
  • Identifies topics related to your search
  • Helps discover influencers
  • None
Brandwatch is great for those wanting to find what people are talking about on social media channels. Perfect to discover the impact of your social media efforts.
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.

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