BACKGROUND
Can you provide a brief description of your company?
I work for a B2B tech PR firm.
What role do you play there?
I am the Social Media Account Executive. I work on social media management, both internally and for some of our clients.
OPPORTUNITY/CHALLENGE
What was the business challenge your company was facing that initiated the need for this platform?
The reason we got Brandwatch was to monitor sentiment on social media for one of our clients. They're a distribution company, so they wanted to focus on their clients’ shipping, find out if people are talking about it, and if it's good, bad, or neutral. That's why we got Brandwatch to begin with.
SOLUTION
How does your company implement this platform or software?
I would get in there and set up a search query with all of their clients’ handles and certain key terms such as ‘shipping’, ‘packaging’, and ‘delivery’. Then I would go to one of the dashboards that dealt with the sentiment, and filter through the conversation that was happening around these certain clients. If they were good, bad, or neutral, I would make note of all of these and export them so I could show our client that this is what people are talking about. For example, 'person A' loved the shipping and packaging. They had a good word cloud of big keywords floating around this industry or sphere. We would send that back to our client to make sure we were using the same phrases and words in our messaging.
Was your company considering other platforms? Why this platform?
We actually had Brandwatch when I started. We had looked at Crimson Hexagon as an option and Radian6, but Brandwatch filled our needs and had better pricing packages.
On an annual or monthly basis, how much does your company spend to utilize the platform?
We spend $2000-$3000 annually.
FEATURES
Were there any software features or tools that really impressed you?
Brandwatch is a very powerful tool if you really get in there and learn how to use it. The query setup is very intuitive, which was cool to see. You need to know in advance that it is a very powerful tool, and you need to spend the time to get in there and work with it to make sure you're using it to its full potential.
Looking back, are there any areas of the software upon which you feel could be added or improved?
It wasn't super user friendly. Building the queries once I figured it out was great, but figuring it out was very difficult. The whole platform could be more user friendly in general. That's the overall feeling I got from people in our office who tried to use it.
Have you had to interact with the platform's support team or reference their support resources?
I reached out to their team a couple of times. Our contact there gave us a walk-through at the beginning that was very helpful. That's how I learned to build the queries. After that, we started using it less and less, but they were very attentive and responsive.
Do you have any recommendations for potential users?
I would make sure you research all the other platforms out there. Pricing may be more for the other ones out there, but other products may be more intuitive and easier to use thank Brandwatch. As long as you're willing to put in the time and effort it takes to learn the platform, I think it's fantastic and it has a lot of useful information.
RATINGS
We have a few quick questions and, for each question, we ask you to rate the software on a scale of one to five, with five being the best.
What would you give the software for functionality of the features available?
3
What would you give the software for ease of use or ease of implementation into your business?
2
For support, as in responsiveness of the team or helpfulness of the resources available?
4
How likely are you to recommend the software to a colleague or similar business?
3
For overall satisfaction with the platform?
3