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…
Good for some companies but not others, especially not ours.
Easy to use and collaborative tool for SMM for large scale clients but there are more affordable options.
A very professional tool that helps many social media teams
Brandwatch is certainly the most dynamic and well supported Social Insight platform available today
Very pleased with Brandwatch
Crimson Hexagon User's Review
360 degree solution for social media listening, monitoring, and reporting
An incredible alternative to manage your social network
Brandwatch/Crimson Hexagon is a powerhouse
Brandwatch Consumer Research is the GO TO platform for improving your marketing strategy
Comprehensive and very attractive reporting...maybe too fiddly.
Union Metrics Must Be in your Social Arsenal
Drive real value and insights with Brandwatch
Brandwatch has a great impact on my company
Good For Top Level Social Listening
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
Pro
$800
Enterprise
3000+
Entry-level set up fee?
- Setup fee optional
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Product Demos
Take your Brandwatch data anywhere: The power of the API
Brandwatch is... More Simple to Use
Brandwatch has... More Filters
Social Media: Measurement and Reporting
Brandwatch has... More Data Quality
Brandwatch Experts: 1. Sentiment Analysis
Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Brandwatch?
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
Brandwatch Video
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Brandwatch Integrations
Brandwatch Competitors
Brandwatch Technical Details
Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Brandwatch Customer Size Distribution
Consumers | 1% |
---|---|
Small Businesses (1-50 employees) | 9% |
Mid-Size Companies (51-500 employees) | 20% |
Enterprises (more than 500 employees) | 70% |
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(149)Community Insights
- Business Problems Solved
- Recommendations
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:
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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.
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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.
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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)A very professional tool that helps many social media teams
- 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
Crimson Hexagon User's Review
- 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.
Wouldn't recommend it
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 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.
Brandwatch is worth every penny!
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.
- 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
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.
Brandwatch for the "Listening Edge" of Digital
- 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.
- 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 Rocks My World
- Identifies topics related to your search
- Helps discover influencers
- None
An impressive enterprise level social listening tool
- 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.
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.