Brand24 Review

Detailed Reviews

Brand24 is a web-based social media monitoring tools which helps the user analyze traffic around particular keywords. The company is based in Poland and has customers from all around the world. The application can be used in several ways depending on the need of the user.

Pros

• Lots of filters: There are plenty of filters to get data which is most relevant to you. It lets you filter mentions based on sources, popularity, region, and even the sentiment. This allows the user to focus on specific areas of interest.
• Easy to export: Brand24 allows for easy exporting of data and its use in other projects and programs. It can generate a detailed pdf file, an infographic slide, and a .csv file with all the data.
• Easy to collaborate: They allow you to include more users in your project(s). The number of permitted users vary according to the subscription plan, and you can control the extent of access they get in the projects.
• Assess your competition: You can compare the performance of brands or keywords and asses the reasons behind the success of others. This helps the organizations realize where they have been going wrong or how they can further improve the reputation of their brand.
• Slack friendly: Brand24 lets you integrate your projects with Slack. This cross-platform integration multiplies efficiency.

Cons

• Not enough integrations: One expects more integrations from a social media monitoring tool. They need to get creative and introduce more integrations on the platform.
• A bit on the expensive side: Brand24 is not insanely expensive, but we feel there is still some space for aggressive pricing.
• Under-developed algorithms: They still need to refine algorithms for features such as sentiment analysis. The feature sounds very exciting, but its core algorithm needs to improve.

Introduction

Internet and social media have given voice to opinions of customers and users around globe. Customers used to have views about services and products even before the social media took over, but it was difficult for their voices to reach others.

It is as if social media platforms handed a sound amplifier to all these people who wanted to be heard. They can now reach out to a lot more people with ease. This freedom has encouraged others to voice their opinion as well.

People are now expressing their views about almost anything. If you are related to a brand or a business, then it will be wise of you to keep an ear on what these people are saying.

Brand24 allows you to monitor the ongoing trends, and therefore, react accordingly.

User opinion still holds power to sway the decision of a potential customer. I think that both of us can agree that we are more likely to get a product which someone from our circle recommended to us or had a good experience with it.

Observing the trends and opinion of people about your product or brand is one of the critical elements of marketing.

In this review, we will try to gauge how easy it is for one to monitor these online trends using Brand24. It is not all about collecting data from the internet but about how well can one interpret the information and use it to his benefit.

We will also judge the effectiveness of the tools provided to social media monitoring easier. Since there are a lot of social media tools which allow the user to both manage as well as monitor the traffic, we expect Brand24 to have some impressive features to make it the right choice.

The review will also be helpful for you if you don’t have much knowledge of how social media monitoring works as we will be discussing the key features along the way.

Start listening

The first step before you start listening or monitoring is to be sure about what is it that you want to monitor on the internet. The platform asks you to enter the keywords that you want to follow.

You have the options to monitor how much people are talking about your brand, or how much are they are talking about your industry in general. You can even try to see how much people are talking about your competitor on the internet and what they think of your competition.

One needs to slightly cautious while deciding the keywords as some of them can be really vague and bring in a lot of noise into the results.

Brand24 also offers advanced settings options for you to enter the keywords. In these advanced settings, you can be specific about the keywords and phrases that you want to be included in the results, and the ones that you don’t want.

You can choose the sources of the results and block sites or authors from the results. Once you are done entering the keywords, the software will present all the hustle and bustle that is happening on the internet around your selected keyword.

The results

Brand24 looks for your keyword all over the internet, finds all the sources which mention it, and then presents the data to you in a neat and sorted manner.

The result screen may look intimidating to some people at the beginning, but one a closer look they will realize that all of it has been broken down into simple pieces for the user. Once you start concentrating on individual sections of the data, it becomes extremely easy to analyze the results.

Let us discuss the dashboard and the data provided by this social media listening tool.

The dashboard displays all the projects you have assigned to the tool. It also shows the date on which you created the project, and if the project has got any new mentions since the last time you checked it out.

You can choose whichever project you want to be working on, and it will take you to the ‘Mentions’ tab. This tab shows you a timeline of the buzz around your selected keyword.

It also contains a lot of filters for you to scan the data and it also displays some of the top mentions.

The panel on the left contains tabs other than ‘Mentions’ as well, and we will discuss those tabs in the subsequent sections of this review.

The timeline at the top shows the number of mentions and social media reaches of the topic in the last 30 days by default. You can change the duration of the results according to your convenience.

The tool allows you to include the number of likes, shares, and comments around the mentions as well. You can also choose to see the sentiment on the timeline. The tool uses a basic algorithm to figure out the sentiment related to the product, and may not be reliable at times.

Any sudden hikes on the timeline indicate that the keyword is getting a lot of attention around this time. If it is your brand, you can analyze the mentions to ensure that it is the right kind of attention. If that is not the case, then you can swiftly take preventive measures before the situation escalates any further.

The sources of the mentions are present right below the timeline. It includes Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Blogs, Forum, etc. You can filter the results based on these sources as well.

The sources can give you a lot of pointers for your future marketing strategies. It can tell you what platforms are working best for you and which ones need more attention.

There are many more filters on the right side of the data. You can filter the data based on sentiment, influencer score, location, interaction, domain, etc. It allows you to set up email notifications as well.

You can save the filters that you have applied which saves a lot of time during other analysis sessions.

One of the useful features on the tool is that it allows the user to share the data with others in three different ways.

The first method is through a pdf file. You have the option to apply any filter before you decide to export the data in a pdf file or some other form.

Brand24 will ask you about the information you want to include in the pdf. This allows the user to put more emphasis on the important stuff. The tool will provide you a detailed pdf file which you can use to decide future marketing strategies.

It also allows you to export the data in a CSV file. This can be helpful when it comes to integrating this data with other software that the enterprise may be using.

The final way to export the data is through an infographic slide. It is essentially the summary of the data. One can use it in presentations to showcase the trends.

Analysis and influences

The mentions page gives you an idea of the broader picture around the keyword. You can plan your strategies around these trends.

Most of these may revolve around working with the factors which are most prominent when it comes to affecting the traffic related to the keyword.

This is when the next two tabs of the right panel, ‘Analysis’ and ‘Sources,’ will come in handy. The Analysis tab presents to you the most popular mentions and authors who are responsible for creating the buzz around the keyword.

The tab also breaks down the number of mentions on one side of the window into sections such as likes, comments, mentions from Facebook, positive mentions, etc. This kind of data aids in market research.

When you scroll down, the tool will once again break down the mentions into different categories for you. However, this time it presents the percentages to you which makes it easier for you to identify the section with the most traffic.

Such a result can help you analyze if your marketing campaign on Facebook is yielding good results or not. The data can also be used for a lot of other market analysis techniques.

The tool will then show you all the leading hashtags in all of the mentions related to the keyword. Next comes the most influential as well as the most active authors.

These lists will showcase the big social media influencers who mentioned your keyword and the not so big ones who mentioned the keyword enough that it created a significant number of reaches.

The next sections of the tab display the most influential websites, the most active ones, and then the regions with the most mentions. This breakdown of data helps a lot to focus on marketing and advertising strategies.

The next panel, Sources, will again highlight the major influencers but with a lot more statistics. You can switch between the authors and the pages when it comes to finding the ones most responsible for social outreach.

Brand24 has generated a scoring system in which they assign a score to all the authors. This influencer score showcases how effective are these authors when it comes to involving the netizens in discussions on a topic.

Internet monitoring tools such as Brand24 can prove to be one of the most effective ways to find the best social media influencers for the promotion of your brand.

It is not necessary that all the top authors may have something positive to say about your brand. But the tool makes it much easier to find those who are genuinely interested in your brand. This makes for a better and more organic marketing strategy.

Keep a check on your competition

You can use Brand24 not just to monitor your progress but also of your competitors to make sure that they don’t get way too ahead of you.

You can create a different project in which you monitor how well your rivals are doing. You can choose to assess them separately, or you also have the option to directly compare your trends against theirs.

There is a Comparison tab on the side panel which displays data of both the projects. You can choose to include more products in the comparison if you want.

It will compare the total mentions, density on various sources, and general sentiment attached with keywords. This can help you to get more ideas to promote your brand and stay more relevant in the market.

If they have a lot of mentions on some platform and you don’t, then you try to find out what is making them so much successful in that category.

For instance, we compared two different shows, and you can notice the apparent difference in the top sources and popularity of the two. It indicates that it will be a good idea for the latter to concentrate on other sources of traffic.

You can use this comparison feature of Brand24 in a lot of different ways. You can use it compare two different online trends to know which one will be better suit your next marketing campaign.

Collaborate with your team

Monitoring all the content related to a single keyword or brand is a complicated and difficult task. This is why we need tools such as Brand24 to filter and summarize all this information for us.

But it can still be a daunting task for an individual to asses the summary or the condensed form of information. And since the human element is a very crucial factor using algorithms to take the next decisions does not sound like a great idea.

This social media monitoring tool allows you to add more users to help you with the projects. You can selectively assign projects to different people.

If you want, you can allow them to access more parts of your account. The ‘Account Settings’ button contains the tab which will let you include more users in your projects.

You can choose if you want to provide the person with global access to your account or access to individual projects going on in your account. It will further ask you to decide on the role of the person.

There are four different options with varying extent of access to the user. Brand24 asks you for the email address of the person and then notifies them about the new privileges via the email.

You can use this option to assign different projects to your team members, or you can bring in your colleagues to get some of their insight into the project.

Quick alerts

Brand24 allows you to modify notification settings. This can help the user avoid any possible brand image catastrophe by quickly reacting to the new modifications.

The notification settings are flexible enough for you to use them for a lot of purposes. Firstly, you can choose who gets notifications. You can enable the notifications for others.

Secondly, you can decide how frequently you want to get informed about the status of the trends. This means you can apply a higher frequency of notifications for sensitive topics and lower frequency for the less important ones.

And the most exciting part of the notification settings is that it lets you apply all the filters which were available on the ‘Mentions’ page.

So, you can choose how influential should be an author before the tool notifies you about it. Or you can make sure you are notified frequently about all the mentions with a negative sentiment. This way you can attend an unsatisfied customer before things get out of hand.

You can opt for one or both of email notifications and phone notifications so that you don’t fall behind on any of the important action.

Integrates with Slack

Talking about getting notified and handling a situation before it gets out of hands, Slack can be a useful tool to help you assign various tasks to team members to deal with any situation effectively.

You can integrate different projects on Slack along with the necessary filters. You will need to save the filter settings in the ‘Mentions’ tab. The saved filter setting will then be available against the name of the project when you integrate it with Slack.

This kind of integration saves valuable time which one may use in switching between the different platforms. Time is of the essence in crunch situations, and you will want to utilize every bit of it as efficiently as you can.

Pricing

The ROI that you get on this tool depends heavily on how well you utilize it. They provide different plans with the pricing according to the features available on the version.

The most primitive version of this tool is advertised for personal use. It is for people such as bloggers who maintain personal websites and need credible data to grow them.

For instance, the blogger can use it to find the hottest topic related to the keyword or subject and then create the next article with that in mind.

This basic version allows 50 thousand mentions per month, five users, and updates every 12 hours for a maximum of five keywords. It also contains other basic features such as sentiment analysis, Slack integration, etc.

The next version is for professionals who have a bigger space to scan and more data to process. This plan allows the user to search for data for a maximum of 10 keywords.

It nets in a maximum of 400 thousand mentions per month, updates every hour, and allows for the inclusion of 10 users. Notable extra features in this plan are the live help and the reports.

The version made for professional agencies and teams comes with full access to all the features available on this tool. They can monitor 35 keywords with up to one million mentions in the results.

This version provides live updates, and one can include 99 users in the team. Brand24 provides a consultant to the customers who get this version. The consultant helps them in setting up the projects and analysis of the result.

We still maintain that users need to use Brand24 efficiently to get the maximum out of it. At the end of the day, it is just a tool which can help you achieve your targets.

They offer a 14-day free trial service with no strings attached. It is a fantastic opportunity for anyone who is not much sure about this service. Two weeks should be enough to tell you if you can get sufficient assistance from this social media monitoring service.

Customer support

Customer support does not seem to be that big of a concern. The application is simple to use, and most of the people know what they are doing when they subscribe to such a service.

However, there are still a lot who may need some guidance or assistance at various points, and the Brand24 has done a decent job in taking care of the needs of such people.

The video tutorials and the knowledgebase section contain more than enough information for one to know more about the tool. They have detailed articles, FAQ sections, and interactive video tutorials to help the user.

There is also a live chat option available, but we had a bittersweet experience with it. We did not get a response on a lot of occasions. We won’t suggest you rely a lot on the live chat feature.

We should also mention that we used only the trial version of Brand24, and it is a possibility that customer support services are much better for subscribed users.

Conclusion

There should be no doubt that Brand24 is a powerful tool to get a better understanding of the online ecosystem of brands or keywords.

It gives you information about what is happening on the internet and enables you to leverage it for your benefits.

It aids analysis of the information with its filters and features. The filters help eliminate the unnecessary noise which translates into better efficiency.

Brand24 lets you take care of your companions as well as competitors. The ability to work as a team and knowledge of standings of the competitor gives one good advantage over the others.

There are also a few areas where we would love to see some improvements. Customer support service and third-party integrations should be among the primary focus of Brand24 thinktanks.

In our opinion, this social media monitoring tool will be a valuable asset for all individuals and organizations who want to stay relevant in this constantly evolving online landscape.