Brand24

Imagine it’s 2009, you’re a digital marketer, and your boss is checking in on the latest banner ad project. “Don’t worry,” you tell her, “I’ve got my artificial intelligence platform scanning online conversations, performing lexical and sentiment analysis across the entire internet to help us find the perfect message that will resonate with audiences. Should be a few minutes.”

In 2009, that’s the kind of sarcasm that gets you fired. In 2024, on the other hand, that’s your daily task list—especially if you’re a social media manager. These kinds of tools are indispensable in the modern day advertising landscape, with no shortage of options to choose from. And Brand 24 has emerged as one of the biggest standouts in its field after a pretty nonstandard growth trajectory. 

Founded in 2011 by Michal Sadowski, Brand24 began its life serving as a social media listening tool in Sadowski’s native Poland. By 2013, they’d also set up shop in Indonesia, identifying it as an underserved market that was ripe for the picking. Those instincts turned out to be good ones, and had Brand 24 getting noticed on both European and Asian fronts. The TL;DR of it all is that these two footholds enabled Brand24 to organically grow itself to a global presence. Of course, that doesn’t just happen by being at the right places at the right times. The tech behind the platform was its strongest selling point, and the company has never stopped improving that tech.

Fast forward to today, and social media managers looking for deep data will find all that and more with Brand24. The numerous AI tools add context to that data, while automating some of the most mundane day-to-day tasks involved in planning, monitoring, and reporting on campaigns. In this way, Brand24 transcends being a mere listening tool to become something of a marketing platform itself. 

Currently, they’ve got over 4,000 customers of all sizes and across diverse industries (think: Samsung, Wondery, and Stanford University). At least once a month, new updates are released with new features and improvements on old ones. Brand24 hit the ground running in 2011 and they show no signs of slowing down.

Pricing

It’s not hyperbole to say that one of Brand24’s innovations is in its pricing. When we think of the sheer amount of data that the algorithm ingests, and the processing requirements of AI, the budget friendliness of Brand24’s pricing tiers cannot be understated. The tiers are smartly designed to meet different needs:

• Individual, $99/mo ($79/mo if billed annually) — 1 user can track up to 3 different keywords, with up to 2k of these mentions viewable per month. Data from Facebook, Instagram, The Platform formerly known as Twitter, Reddit, blogs, news sources, and other forums is refreshed every 12 hours. The only AI feature included here is for Sentiment Analysis; very basic analytics (Volume of Mentions and Engagement tracking) and reporting is included.
  

• Team, $179/mo ($149/mo if billed annually) — Unlimited users, 7 keywords, 5k mentions per month, updated every hour. All the same data sources as above, plus: LinkedIn, Medium, Quora, YouTube, and TikTok. Basic AI is available, same as the Individual plan, but you’ll get deeper analytics, including things like Trending Hashtags, Most Shareable Links, and Word Clouds.
  

• Pro, $249/mo ($199/mo if billed annually) — Unlimited users, 12 keywords, 25k mentions per month, updated in real time. All of the data sources as above, plus: Reviews, Twitch, and Newsletters. Additional AI features, plus AI insights for 1 project per month, all the analytics, and advanced reporting.
  

• Enterprise, $499/mo ($399/mo if billed annually) — Unlimited users, 25 keywords, 100k mentions per month. All data sources as above, plus podcasts. All AI features, AI insights for up to 3 projects per month, all the analytics, and advanced reporting.

The Features

The foundation of all your monitoring in Brand24 is in the creation of a project. You can then add your keywords to each project. Your brand name will be the obvious place to start, but you can create a project to listen for anything: competitor research, campaign tracking, influencers—whatever you want. It’s a pretty flexible setup that allows for a variety of applications. Sure, you can leisurely scroll your way through all your mentions each day to help guide your marketing, but Brand 24 can also act as a powerful crisis detection tool. The AI goes beyond mere Sentiment Analysis, which tells you if things are positive, neutral, or negative. It can go deeper and identify actual emotion, differentiating between someone who’s sad and someone who’s angry. Couple this ability with a real time notification, and you can publicly correct the course in no time. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Once you’ve created your Project, the Dashboard aggregates all the mentions into an almost social media style feed. At the top of the screen is a graph that charts your mentions and reach over time, with that feed of mentions just below. Depending on the size of your brand, the mentions could be just too numerous to wade through in a sitting. In this case, the platform gives a variety of filters to refine the results and get you closer to what you’re looking for. Want to see only positive messages on Facebook? Joke’s on you, nobody is positive on Facebook. But if they were, Brand24 would find it. Remember that Brand24 can go beyond social, if you want it to, and so you can restrict your search results to things like news stories, videos, and podcasts. For the videos and podcasts, the algorithm doesn’t have the capability to “understand” the actual video and audio contained in the media, but it scans all titles, descriptions, and—importantly—user comments.

For each mention revealed, there are a number of actions you can take, directly from the Brand24 dashboard. If it’s a social post, for example, you can like or reply to it without leaving the dashboard. You can tag the post with an internal label for easy retrieval later. You can visit the post right at the source. There are more actions than this, but you can see just from this level of detail at the Mention level how powerful a tool Brand24 can be. It makes quick work of interacting with users on social—especially important with the ones who might be mad at you, allowing you to defuse customer service issues. On a lighter note, you can just as quickly surprise and delight random brand loyalists when you catch them saying nice things about you.

Next up is Brand24’s analysis tools, where you can really get a lot of contextual information around your mentions. It’s one thing to see all these different mentions individually, but it’s a whole other level of useful for the platform to aggregate all this data and reveal trends in the discussion about your brand. There are the metrics that simply quantify your performance: total mentions and a breakdown of how many were on social vs nonsocial channels. How many were positive? How many were part of User Generated Content? Casting a wider net, Brand24 shows you the top hashtags being used alongside your mentions, helping you focus your future social efforts to where people are already talking about you. There’s a “Presence” score, kind of like a Share of Voice measurement, that clues you into your place in conversation relative to other brands. 

But it goes deeper: Brand24 also surfaces the most prominent and influential voices within those conversations. Top Public Profiles gives you real numbers on these users relevant to the topic, not just some general level of influence. You’re told their Share of Voice and given a total of their reach, along with their usernames and the social channel where they wield this influence—a great way to find brand ambassadors and collaborators. If the analysis were the end of it, we’d be impressed with Brand24 and how it arms social media managers with the intel they need to run effective strategies.

We haven’t yet gotten to the AI tools. The first one helps you to make even more sense of the data in the Analysis section. Artificial Intelligence is a lot better than humans at picking out little details in a sea of data, and Brand24’s AI insights report does just that. It’s a weekly or monthly report that’s generated by all the data you’re collecting with your keywords and projects. Spikes in mentions are correlated specific events/posts, and these are cited in the report. Any specific mentions of your brand by the influential profiles in your Analysis are called out here with links to the specific mentions for further review. The platforms where you’re getting the most value and traction are revealed, along with the suggestion that you should focus more marketing efforts on them. There are quite a few insights that would take a human a lot of screentime to unearth. And there’s the list of recommendations that can get very specific: the AI can see which kinds of content are doing best for you and tell you to do more. Like, “Hey, everytime you post an infographic, people pay attention. Do that again.” Having AI do all this for you is like having your own research assistant who you never have to remind to submit their reports.

And, in fact, Brand24’s AI tools include a kind of “brand assistant,” that you can chat with and bounce ideas off of. Down the left side navigation menu, in a menu section titled “Lab24,” is a short list of some cutting edge additions to the platform. The Brand Assistant has a ChatGPT-like interface, and works off of the same data that the AI Insights get. If you have specific questions about strategies, metrics, or anything else that wasn’t found in your insight report, the Brand Assistant can answer the question (provided, of course, that there’s data to support the answer). To be clear, you’re not going to get a full Statement of Work outlining a detailed plan for your next campaign—and you shouldn’t want that, being that it’s your job. Fortunately, this assistant knows its place and doesn’t try to punch above its weight. The answers a great blend of general strategies tailored for your usage (e.g. “You could use Influencer X to spur more discussion and increase your share of voice.”)

Additional tools in this section include Topic Analysis, which analyzes all the conversations you’re being mentioned in and organizes them by topics. These topics are then mapped out, so you can see how they are connected. If you’re a fashion brand specializing in, say, leather products, you might appear in conversations about bomber jackets and motorcycle chaps, but also about animal rights and veganism—and there is likely no overlap between audiences. This is a simplification of what the platform can do here, but it demonstrates how context helps. Not every conversation is one you want to join while many others are happening among the same people, allowing you to market with precision.

Conclusion

Brand24 isn't your average social media monitoring tool. As you can see, it goes far beyond its original listening capabilities to truly function as a marketing platform in its own right. Their listening tech got Brand24 to where it’s at today, and it’s a truly holistic approach to data gathering. Again, the net is cast far wider than just social channels—videos, podcasts, forums, Reddit…it’s exhaustive. 

Beyond just ingesting data and regurgitating it back to you, the platform lets social media marketers use it in some clever ways. From competitive research, to identifying audiences, campaign inspiration, and even finding influencers who are already talking about you, it’s a data-driven marketer’s dream toolkit.