Brandwatch- Social Listening and Analytics

What is Brandwatch?

Brandwatch is a social media analytic tool that tracks billions of conversations happening online everyday, including blogs, news, forums, videos, twitter, reviews, image, Facebook…etc., and allow brands and companies to understand consumer insights, trends, influencers, and brand perception.

How does it work?

• Crawl: Brandwatch obtain content using proprietary web crawler technology that crawls a list of sites that it covers. It searches through more than 80 million pages every day.
• Analyze the pages:
  • Indexing: The search index technology puts the contents in index so client can search them by words.
  • Sentiment analysis: Brandwatch uses natural language processing technology to conduct sentiment analysis. It is a mathematical model that models linguistic features that indicate sentiment, and on top of that there’s a rule-based process to help the software better understand how context can affect sentiments. As language evolves, the dictionary that machines use to comprehend sentiment will continue to expand.
  • Influence science: Brandwatch Influence Score measures an individual’s ability to generate engagement and amplify messages.
• Data storing: Data is stored in 3 technologies. Traditional database is used to store information about the page, repository storage is used to keep the actual content of the page, and search index puts content into index for easy reference.
• Matching against quires: Clients can use the Brandwatch dashboard to access relevant data presented visually to understand their marketing measurements, competitor activities, and trends.

Value Creation

Brandwatch creates value for the clients through real-time tracking, authentic consumer insights, and influencer identification.

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• Real-time tracking: Differ from traditional marketing tracking method where reports are provided every 1-3 months depending on subscription, Brandwatch provides real-time tracking to clients through self-service dashboard. Client can see brand performances that refresh daily, and optimizes campaigns accordingly.
• Authentic consumer insights- In the past, brands and company gets consumer insights through extensive and expensive consumer research, where the geography, sample size, and research topics are limited. With Brandwatch, brands can learn from organic conversations about themselves from all over the Internet. Not only can brands get access to the bottom-up, real voices of the mass consumer, they also saves time, money and resources on market research.
• Influencers identification: In the past, company seek out influencers to endorse their brands on PR platforms and social media which sometimes seems forced and can be quickly ignored as “advertisement”. With Brandwatch, brands can now identify people who are already talking about the brand, and reach out to them as influencers in an authentic and cost effective manner.

Brandwatch differentiates itself vs its competitor with superior technology, flexibility, and next level insights.

• Superior technology- Brandwatch invests heavily in its proprietary web crawler, natural language processing, and other analytical technologies. 95% of respondents surveyed said that they think Brandwatch technology is superior to their last social intelligence platform. [5]
• Flexibility- Brandwatch provides high flexibility for clients using several in-house systems that can do customization for requirement, including advanced filtering, tagging and categorization, alerts, flexible charting, industry specific topic and sentiment analysis, and plenty more data management capabilities.
• Next level insights- Brandwatch goes beyond social measurement tracking, and provides a much deeper insight into conversation topics, future trends, and actions that can be taken by the brands.

Value Capture

Brandwatch offers 3 products to both SMBs and enterprises: BrandWatch Analytics, Vizia, and Audience.

• BrandWatch Analytics: A live analytics dashboard and a social query engine that provide clients with insights including marketing measurement, competitor benchmarking, reputation management, and market research. Subscription model with £500/ month for small and medium business, £2000/ month for enterprise.
• Vizia- The Vizia platform helps bridge the gap between analysts and decision-makers, communicating data and insights in a visually stimulating story-telling manner. Brandwatch Vizia is offered on a subscription basis, priced according to the number of displays. There is also a one-off set up cost.
• Audience- Brandwatch Audiences employs influencer technology and a live database of over 200m Twitter users to discover the brand’s influencer.

What’s Next

• Image analysis: Images are taking over social media. More than 3 billion photos are shared on social media every day, and 85% don’t contain any text reference to the brands in the photo. [4] While Brandwatch is aware of this trend, it becomes apparent just how difficult it can be for a computer to fully understand context to the same degree that humans can. How would Brandwatch approach the research and development of this new technology? And how can it compete with the other image recognition technology ex: Google, Clarifai…etc.

• Sentiment analysis: To truly understand and capture the broad range of emotions that humans express as written word, sentiment analysis needs to move beyond a one-dimensional positive to negative scale. How should Brandwatch development technology to measure skepticism, hope, anxiety, or excitement? Clients will certainly become more aware of the applications of sentiment analysis within their marketplace, fueling the growth of sector specific services and technology delivering sentiment specific use cases.

Reference

[1] http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2491376,00.asp

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/29/social-intelligence-startup-brandwatch-raises-33m-series-c-to-grow-in-us/

[3] https://reviews.financesonline.com/p/brandwatch/

[4] https://socialmediaweek.org/blog/2017/03/why-images-are-future-of-social-listening/

[5] https://www.brandwatch.com