5 days with Brandwatch

Last week beginning on monday I had permission to the social media monitoring tool Brandwatch for 5 days. During this week I got myself used to the fundamental functionalities and performed a example monitoring for a big company. In the following article I want to give a short introduction of this functionalities and loose some words about the data analysis.



In general you will have the possibility to create projects in order to organize your queries you make. Creating a query, which is a keyword, Brandwatch gives you 2 ways of doing it:

1. Web Query: Therefore Brandwatch will search in Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, Newssites and many more for mentions to the query
2. Facebook Page Query: In this case you connect a Facebook Fan Page you administrate with Brandwatch so that this site can be monitored.

So we have queries organized in projects. The collected data will be shown on the dashboard which gives you some different categories, in which the data will be shown. The daschboard can be customized in certain way such that the user can apply filters and change the view of the data (for example from a data table to a pie chart). I will now give you an overview of the main categories i found during 5 days of testing:

• Summary: delivers an essential overview about the collected data
• Top Sites: there you will find the main pages, on which mentions were found
• Topics: connects the query with topics it was mentioned in
• Charts: gives an detailed overview about the sentiments
• Mentions: List of all mentions (incl. links to them)
• Top Tweeters: List of all tweeters, tweeting about the query
• Site Analysis: analyses the sites, the mentions were found on, in a quantitative as well as qualitative way
• Video Tracking: List of videos concerning the query

Like you can see in this points, the data analysis of Brandwatch doesn't concentrate on numbers, it also tries to interprete the data. So Brandwatch delievers a so called Sentiment analysis for queries as well as ranking the sites using the moz ranking. Furthermore Brandwatch lets the user download the data collected in a query. Therefore the user has to select, which data he wants to download and will then get a link to a Excel or CSV file. (Example: 5 days of monitoring a big company lead to an Excel datasheet of 126MB)
Because Brandwatch is not a cost-free tool, my expectations were quite high, but I have to say that I wasn't disappointed while using it. In my opinion Brandwatch is a very good tool for social media monitoring and sentiment analsis.
But I have to admit, that it the first tool I have taken a closer look at, so can't say where Brandwatch stands in comparison to other tools, right now.

You can find the german version of this articel right here: 5 Tage mit Brandwatch