Brandwatch Social Media Management

Overview

In early 2019, if you were a user of Cision’s Communications Cloud, you had all the tools available to manage your marketing and communications across all conceivable channels—except social media. If that was you in 2019, you were probably excited by the company’s acquisition of Falcon.io, a Danish social media marketing platform that truly rounded out Cision’s offering. Unless you also wanted better tools for competitive and consumer research. Then your only option was to invest in some other, standalone tool. Until 2021, that is, when Cision bought Brandwatch.

At that point the two companies were wed—two great tastes that taste great together—under the single name “Brandwatch.” For good measure, they were also included as part of Cision’s Communications Cloud platform, but that’s not what we’re covering here. 

But Brandwatch doesn’t end there. Joining these two products together to make a single, all-in-one platform for social media marketing research and execution could have been the end of the story, two complementary products rounding each other out. But if you’re a Cision and/or Brandwatch user in 2022, and you want to manage your influencers alongside all your social media—an idea that makes a lot of sense—then you’re excited by the company’s acquisition of Paladin, the end-to-end influencer marketing platform. It’s a natural fit, the kind of acquisition that makes all the sense in the world. 

The good news here is that the branding is really the most pressing thing to be worked out. As you’ll read in this review, the software itself—each distinct piece, and the suite as a whole—is excellent. You just won’t know what to call it.

Brandwatch Social Media Management

A consumer intelligence platform, a social media marketing platform, and an influencer marketing platform were all acquired and forced to play well with each other—and they do!

Pros and Cons

Consumer Intelligence product uses social listening to help brands understand what people want

Audience tools give deep insights into the aggregate AND individuals

Newly added TikTok support goes further than you’d expect

Confusing array of products and services from three different companies

You can't post on multiple networks at once, but you can choose multiple channels within the same network for posting

Best for: Mid to Large-sized Businesses

Ratings

Features

5.0

Ease of Use

4.5

Support

5.0

Overall Score:

4.8

Pricing

Brandwatch offers three distinct pricing plans tailored to meet the specific needs of different user groups: researchers and analysts, social media managers, and influencer marketers. However, specific pricing details are not provided in the given information, and it is indicated that the pricing is custom and may vary based on individual requirements.

Brandwatch: Consumer Intelligence $Custom/month

• Targeted towards researchers and analysts, the Consumer Intelligence plan enables users to gain valuable insights from the vast amount of online conversations. It provides access to the world's largest archive of consumer opinion, allowing users to search for market insights. The plan also offers features like segmenting audiences and conversations in customizable dashboards, analyzing data using advanced AI capabilities, and distributing flexible, automated reporting and alerts across businesses.

Brandwatch: Social Media Management $Custom/month

• Designed for social media managers and content marketers, the Social Media Management plan offers an all-in-one solution for effectively managing social media channels. It provides a centralized platform to manage and collaborate on social media content creation, including organic and paid posts. The plan includes features such as a unified social calendar, a centralized social CRM for engaging with the community, brand monitoring through the leading social listening tool, and the ability to benchmark performance against competitors.

Brandwatch: Influencer Marketing $Custom/month

• Tailored for influencer marketers and agencies, the Influencer Marketing plan streamlines the influencer marketing process. It offers comprehensive tools for discovering the best influencers for brand collaborations, managing influencer relationships, and measuring campaign performance. Users can save time by centralizing data, search a vast influencer database, and run multichannel campaigns while reporting on their effectiveness.

As an aside, all clients are entitled to a free trial of Influence, which is available from the platform.

The Details

Social media management can mean a lot of things, in terms of functionality, and Brandwatch covers pretty much all of those things. Scheduling and publishing posts, engaging with audiences, and measuring the impact of your efforts are the baseline expectations for software like this, so it’s no surprise to find those features here. Additionally, you can also dive deep into your audience’s data, collaborate with team members, manage paid ads, and use social listening tools. 

Scheduling posts is done with the unified calendar—a single calendar which you use to plan out your posting duties across all social channels, including TikTok. Having a calendar like this is pretty standard issue for software like this, but Brandwatch’s approach to it is unique in that it is much more visual than competitors’ offerings. A monthly view of the calendar shows social channel logos and a number next to them for each day—a quick insight into how many posts are scheduled and where they will be posted. The weekly view goes further, showing the actual image or video thumbnail of the post along with its caption. Because Brandwatch posts on your behalf, it also acts as a content library, and the calendar is a chronological view of when that library goes public. Click on any piece of content and it’s enlarged for easy viewing, videos included.

Automated publishing works with all of Brandwatch’s supported channels, including TikTok and Instagram. These are both notable. TikTok is, of course, TikTok, the social media channel that’s gone as viral as the content it serves. Instagram, on the other hand, has a long history of being both tremendously popular and notoriously difficult to integrate with other social media management platforms—this is due to Instagram being much more selective about integrations than other social channels. Just the fact that Brandwatch can directly upload and post on your behalf is a big deal. That they can now do it with Carousels and Reels is an even bigger deal.

The Content Pool is another way into your vast repository of social content. When you upload to your calendar, the content itself is added to the pool. When viewing an individual piece of content, you’ll also get important information about it, like which channels it’s headed to, when it will be or was posted, and maintains an audit trail of who approved it for publication. Images and videos can also be labeled/categorized, useful for later repurposing. 

Social media management can be chaotic, especially for large brands managing multiple accounts, and the public nature of it can raise the stakes pretty high. Anyone can post a complaint about a company that’s viewable by millions of people, so social media teams need to respond and resolve with the world watching. Brandwatch takes some of the edge off this with its “Engage” module, which funnels all your incoming social comments and direct messages into their own Brandwatch feeds. You can create and customize your feeds according to the channel or labels you’ve given to your content. If someone from your team assigns a comment or message to you for a reply, that’ll show up in its own feed. Any words or phrases you’ve set the software to “listen” for will appear in their own feed here, as well. Your team will never miss a message—and there are some automation features for more common responses. It’s on you to make sure you respond in full and appropriately, though.

Brandwatch’s reporting and analysis feature has long been considered one of their strong points, and that shows in their newly added measurement functions for TikTok. It of course includes all the favorite metrics for social performance around reach and engagement, and you can look at reports that are campaign specific, or overviews of the channels themselves. Within the TikTok channel, while looking at how your content performed, you’ll be able to dig into how people found that content in the first place. Were they going down a rabbit hole of a specific sound that led them to viewing your video? Was it because of a tag? Did the algorithm feed it? Virality on TikTok is more common than other social channels, but that’s not because the content is necessarily better. It’s just a function of how the platform works, and Brandwatch lets you get downright forensic in understanding why (and maybe repeating your success in the future).

The last feature we want to highlight (but by no means the last feature on offer here) is Brandwatch’s Audience module. In addition to aggregated data around audience size, demographics, and networks, the platform goes deep by acting as a kind of CRM for individual members of your audience. Every time a person interacts with any of your registered social accounts, Brandwatch adds them to your audience, records the interactions (and adds all future ones) while allowing you to add any other data and labels you want. This gives you an enormous amount of insight into your audience and allows you to segment in powerful ways. 

Add-on Influence

Catering to influencer marketing across platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, this add-on provides powerful filtering, a dedicated influencer CRM, and automated reporting. Users benefit from customizable onboarding and reporting, streamlining the process and enhancing efficiency. Once proficient, the Influence add-on greatly improves influencer marketing efforts, making it a valuable tool for users willing to invest time in learning and configuration.

The consumer intelligence product complements this by using AI and social listening to understand consumers beyond your audience and give insights into how they can become part of it. This level of audience understanding is deep, and there are very few platforms that go this far. Now add to this a nearly end-to-end suite of influencer marketing tools, and Brandwatch starts to sound like a game changer. You’ll know your audience so well, it’ll make finding people with the influencer discovery tool that much easier, to say nothing of how effective the influencer campaigns you manage with Brandwatch will be. It gets to the heart of what social media is all about, by facilitating authentic connections with your audience.

Conclusion

Brandwatch is definitely in a period of transition, but it’s not one of uncertainty. There’s just too much good software at the heart of all these changes for us to say you should wait to see how all this shakes out. There are a lot of product names, and a little too much separation between these products. But that doesn’t seem to have an effect on the interface or ease of use—the platform, in all its facets, is a winner. Any one of the products would receive a high rating as a standalone—a little confusion around the branding shouldn’t dissuade you from giving Brandwatch a try.