Brand24 is a social media monitoring tool. By inputting keywords of your choice, the app will scour the internet, pick out social media posts which mention your keyphrase, and put them all in a unified social inbox. Not to mention the powerful sentiment analysis and other analytics. The list of uses for such software is long, but here are the most obvious ones:
- Brand Reputation Management
- Digital PR
- Customer Feedback and Support
- Crisis Management
- Market Research
- Earned Media Value
- Competitor Research
- Hashtag Analytics
- Social Media Marketing
- Better Business Decisions
Brand24 has grown quite a bit since its inception and is now a perfect solution for major brands and agencies worldwide. Here’s a list of data sources they can monitor for relevant mentions:
Telegram | TikTok | |
Twitch | App Store | |
YouTube | Google Play Store | |
Booking | Yelp | TripAdvisor |
Google Reviews | Podcasts | |
Newsletters | Blogs | News sites |
Forums |
Social media is one of the best ways to grow your business and spread the word about what you have to offer, but how on earth do you keep track of it all?
And Brand24 is all about social media listening. But it has so much more than you think. This could be the greatest social media monitoring software you ever used, and this review aims to show you why.
What is Brand24’s Social Media Monitoring Tool?
With instant access, you are always in the loop and can see if people are talking about you in a positive or negative sentiment.
It’s even more than this though; it’s a smart platform in the sense that allows for individuals tracking, giving immediate responses, and ultimately preventing social media blow-ups 😅 before they occur.
It can be used from your office, your home, and even on your mobile phone, allowing you to stay in touch with your customer base no matter where you are. It has the ability to detect sales opportunities, help you discover the best keywords, and ultimately show you how to make your business stand out from the crowd.
Brand24 is suitable both for large and small businesses. There are huge benefits to reap, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s still so much more to uncover.
The Key Features of Brand24
What are the key features that Brand24 has to offer though? This software has so many incredible aspects that will make life so much easier for you when trying to manage your social media and up your marketing campaigns. It works across pretty much every powerful platform, including the big three: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Mentions Feed
This is quite self-explanatory. The brand mentions feed works by allowing you to analyze online conversations that involve your business across social media channels. You can look at what people are saying to and about you in real-time; so, you can take action quickly.
The graph is easy to read, and it can be adjusted so that you can view mentions on a daily, weekly, or monthly scale. What’s more, the found unlinked mentions that come from online news sites and blogs also create an opportunity to reclaim the links. It’s especially useful to monitor your HARO pitches, too.
Social Media Mention Analytics 📈
The mention analytics link in with the above feature seamlessly. This particular aspect works by giving you a deeper insight into who is interacting with you.
It will show you more information about your customers, so you can find out more about the demographic, the things that they like, word cloud, and the aspects that they aren’t too fond of.
Here are the metrics Brand24 can establish based on its dataset. Below is an explanation of each of them.
Mentions – total number of entries containing a given keyword.
Social Media Mentions – total number of mentions across all social media channels.
Non-Social Mentions – these include news websites, and forums. Basically, everything that’s not a social media channel.
Estimated Social Media Reach – this is the estimated number of people who could have had an interaction with posts containing a particular phrase. It’s based on the popularity of social media accounts posting about a topic, the amount of those accounts, as well as visibility percentage for a given social network.
Non-Social Reach – estimated number of impressions outside of social media. This is based on the number of websites that mentioned your phrase, their monthly visits, and the visibility ratio.
Social Media Interactions – total number of interactions (likes, comments, shares, retweets, etc.) in posts containing a given keyword.
User Generated Content – total number of mentions generated by users, e.g. social media, blogs, and forums.
Social Media Likes – the number of likes under posts containing a phrase on social media.
Number of Videos – the number of videos found on posts containing a keyword on social media.
Positive Mentions – how many posts there are which contain the keyword and have a potentially positive sentiment.
Negative Mentions – how many posts there are which contain the keyword and have a potentially negative sentiment.
AVE (Advertising Value Equivalent) – this is an estimate one would have to spend to achieve a similar level of exposition for a specific phrase.
Presence Score
Presence Score is a newly-introduced metric which can give you an idea of how your marketing efforts fare at a given time. By looking at this score, you can establish which Public Relations/Marketing strategies you’ve employed have worked. Or, if there are no such strategies in place, you can start looking for potential crises if you see a sudden steep increase.
Presence Score consists of the number of mentions within a timeframe, as well as their potential reach. The more of each, the larger the Presence Score. The scale’s growth decreases as your keyword gets more and more popular. This means that it’s way easier to get from 0 to 20 than from 70 to 90. The above graph shows the popularity of Justin Trudeau, who is quite a large name.
The score is calculated for each day based on social data from last week.
Sentiment Analysis
This is definitely one of the best features that Brand24 has to offer because sentiment analysis is a fantastic way to discover more about the kind of comments people are making about you and your company. It’s especially useful for conducting a negative incidence sentiment audit.
I have a more detailed article on what sentiment analysis is and the way it works, but to put it briefly, it is where you can determine the tone of the comment, as it looks at both positive 😃 and negative sentiment 🙁
Being able to filter through these comments to find the negative ones mean that you can address areas in your business that need improvement or more work, but also if there are comments that are being labelled as negative when they actually aren’t.
This is because sentiment analysis hasn’t quite been able to work around sarcasm, and there are some words that are deemed solely negative because the algorithm cannot always determine context.
However, the vast majority of sentiment analysis results are accurate, so it gives you a good reading as to how your company is doing in customer conversations.
Quite recently, Brand24 have introduced a new feature within their context of a discussion tool. Now, instead of displaying a simple word cloud, each word is either green (positive), red (negative), or grey (neutral). That way, you can see actionable insights as to how a particular discussion about a keyword plays out.
Sudden Decline or Rise 🤯 ?
Watch Discussion Volume Chart
If you want to know if there is a sudden decline or rise in the number of people talking about your company on social media, this dashboard will be able to show you everything. It gives you the chance to see if something good is happening, or if there is an issue you need to address quickly.
Additionally, it can help you to improve customer service and therefore increase any positive press you are already receiving. As we all know, good or bad customer care can make or break a brand.
Brand24 Red Alerts 🔔
You can’t sit staring at your dashboard all day, so Brand24 have a handy email alert system ⚠️ to let you know when things start to change, or there is an issue that needs your attention.
You can also customise the alerts you receive as well, tailoring them to something that your business actually needs and will find helpful as opposed to standard alerts that might not even apply to you. Also, they have a mobile app so you can use Brand24 wherever you are.
Data Exporting 💾
Being able to keep a record of your social media analytics is an important part of the job, and exporting the data means that you can ensure there is a digital trail to keep you up to date and so that you can compare past records for increase or dfecline.
You have the data exported into a number of different files, including PDF reports and Excel spreadsheets.
Filtering
This is a standard feature, but still an important one because there are social media tools that don’t incorporate this. Filtering lets you narrow down your results so that you can look at the specifics in more detail.
You can filter according to things like sentiment analysis, mentions, visit number, and other terms like this.
Influencer Score 📊
An influencer is capable of making or breaking a company, especially if they have a large audience and following. Checking the score means that you become aware of who is out there promoting your brand and talking about it, as well as which influencers you should reach out to so that you can work together.
It is often a mutually beneficial partnership and one that you are unlikely to regret. Because of that, social media listening tools had become an integral part of any digital marketing strategy.
Comparison Tab
Later on, we mention that you can track your competitors, but you are able to do so much more than that. The comparison tab allows you to take up to five different projects and compare them with your competition, keeping track of what is happening both to your brand and theirs, as well as look at the basic statistics and analytics to track any similarities or differences.
There’s more though, and this comes in the form of filters. What these do is allow you to narrow things down, comparing results from one source or domain for specifics regards projects or products to see how yours is doing when compared to theirs.
You can also track the mentions between companies, looking at the areas where you can improve as well as where you are doing well.
Plus, you can take a look at the sentiment behind it. Are people saying more good things about your company than the competitor’s, or is it the other way around 🤔 ? It offers the perfect opportunity to learn more about your customers, as well as keep tabs on the competition.
Hashtag Search
Hashtags are the most powerful part of social media, especially on platforms like Twitter and Instagram. Without them, our reach is massively reduced, and the same goes for using the wrong ones.
Brand24 offer both hashtag tracking and analytics on top of the search function, and this will help you to determine which ones you should be using for your company if you want to reach new audiences.
Everything here happens in real-time, and you can set up a project, or your own hashtag campaign, to find influencers, competitors, check your influencer score, and measure the social reach and share of voice that each of them has.
You can analyse the popularity of each hashtag that you use, monitoring how frequently it is used as well as the amount of engagement it has across platforms. The tracking will provide you with regular analysis reports, each of which can be exported into a PDF or Excel file.
After typing your desired hashtag in, you can then estimate the social reach it will yield for your business. You can even use it to reach the biggest profiles on social media, looking at who is the best and what makes their profiles so desirable to others.
The dashboard itself is also very easy to access and use, with all the data clearly laid out for you to browse through.
Competitor Knowledge and Sales Detection
Knowing what your competitors are up to and how they are doing can benefit you massively. It shows you what kind of mentions they are getting, allowing you to learn from their actions and mistakes, as well as how to make your social media strategy better.
You can also use the social search function to identify the latest trends and topics so that you can get involved.
All of this, as well as the rest of the features Brand24 offer, lets you detect potential new sales quickly and efficiently.
You have the listening tool you need in order to help customers with their research before they buy and convince them that you are the right choice to make. It shows you where to promote products, where to find customers, and how to reach out to them.
Slack Integration
Slack is a popular tool that is used by companies around the world. It’s a cloud-based system that is used for team collaboration and messaging, so that your entire workforce can stay connected at all times; even breaking it down into departments.
Brand24 has a superb integration feature that allows it to be hooked up to Slack so that your whole team can see your analytics. The set-up is really easy, and the benefits are huge.
Aside from being able to see the usual, so analytics and real-time comments and interactions, you are also sharing that live data with your team.
This means that you can assign someone who is fully qualified to deal with any issues that arise as they happen, and there is always someone around who can tackle the problem. Responses and interactions tend to be faster, and all your tools are together.
Custom Reports
The team at Brand24 can produce a custom report for your company. Given their expert knowledge of both their tool and the social media monitoring expertise, the report can provide you with real insights you can then act on.
Each report will contain:
- A glossary of important metrics they used
- A quick summary and overview
- Social presence across 30 days and 6 months
- Presence benchmarks with the most prominent competitors
- Sources of mentions along with benchmarks
- In-depth sentiment analysis
- Top negatives, which will help you identify issues with your service
- Top mentions and public profiles with benchmarks
- Trending links and hashtags
- Cross competitor mentions
- Presence by country
- A word cloud
- Finally, key mentions of your company which had the most reach and the same of competitors.
A complete sample report for Netflix can be found here.
Brand24 & How it Can Benefit You
Now that you know more about what Brand24 has to offer, it is also good to learn how it can benefit you; both as a person and a company. While there are plenty of advantages to this software, four of them really make a difference.
Discover Customer Opinions
You are able to see customers’ and followers’ real-time data, as well as whether or not those comments are positive or negative in tone. Web monitoring ability gives you the power to see how people perceive your business at all times. This, in turn, allows for much better online reputation management.
It means that you have the chance to boost customer satisfaction levels and create the ultimate customer experience. What’s more, this also makes it possible to get insight generation to help you identify what sectors of your product need improvement.
Discover Issues Instantly
Social media explosions happen quickly, and they can start at any time. Tools like this offer you the ability to nip these situations in the bud from anywhere in the world, protecting your name and your company from negative press.
It also means that you have the opportunity to show your customers how much you care about them and their concerns.
Identify Top Influencers
Influencers on social media are an important thing for any brand, and being able to identify them allows you to get in touch and discover new ways to work together.
These people promote your brand via brand ambassadors, and this tool lets you track them to discover which ones have the most impact and the biggest following.
Uncover Essential Analytics
The analytics tool lets you take a look at everything from your follower count and number of mentions, to the things that customers react positively to and those that they do not.
It compresses all the essential information you need into one place so that you can monitor your progress and influence across all of your different social media platforms to see where you stand with your target audience, and where you can make changes.
The Cost of Brand24: Pricing Tiers 🏷️
As with any software that you are looking at buying and using, knowing the price and what comes with each plan is essential. There are plenty of options, so whether you’re a small business or a large enterprise, you’ll undoubtedly find something for yourself. Brand24 offer a 14-day free trial and then a choice from three different monthly plans, each of which is outlined for you below.
Individual | Team | Pro | Enterprise |
$49 | $99 | $149 | $249 |
3 keywords | 7 keywords | 12 keywords | 25 keywords |
2K mentions/mo | 5K mentions/mo | 25K mentions/mo | 100K mentions/mo |
1 user | Unlimited users | Unlimited users | Unlimited users |
Update every 12h | Update every hour | Real-time update | Real-time update |
What’s an alternative to Brand24 Social Media Monitoring Software?
Serpwoo
A comprehensive SEO tool, apart from brand monitoring, it offers a number of other features. Founded back in 2012 in Miami Beach, Florida, Serpwoo has become a relatively large player in terms of brand monitoring. Their tools’ specialty is niche tracking.
Awario
Awario was born in 2015, so it’s a somewhat new project. They were featured on websites such as Forbes, Entrepreneur and Neil Patel’s blog posts. Their mission is to provide businesses with the best, most in-depth and true social listening data and help them with online reputation management.
Mention
Mention is one of the largest media monitoring tools out there. They have prominent clients such as Microsoft, Spotify, Airbnb, and MIT. Mention was created in 2012 and they’re based in NYC and Paris with a team of over 60 people constantly working to improve the tool.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a social media management platform that offers media monitoring as one of their features. Sprout was founded in 2010, and right now has more than 500+ employees. It’s one of the largest platforms out there.
Hootsuite
In a nutshell, Hootsuite is an all-in-one platform that enables users to monitor and schedule posts for multiple social media accounts. In other words, it’s a handy tool for anyone who wants to save time and maximize their social media presence.
But that’s not all Hootsuite can do. The platform also provides users with powerful analytics tools along with media monitoring, so you can track your performance and measure your business results.
Talkwalker
Talkwalker is a social media monitoring tool that provides users with insights into how their brand is being talked about online. It offers a range of features that allow brand managers to track mentions of their brand, measure sentiment, and analyze competitor activity. In addition, Talkwalker provides users with the ability to create custom reports and dashboards to help them with strategic decision making about their social media strategy.
Meltwater
Meltwater is a brand image monitoring tool that allows businesses to track how their brand is being represented across the entire web. By monitoring online mentions of your brand, you can quickly see how your marketing ROI is paying off. Meltwater also provides valuable insights into what people are saying about your brand, so you can make necessary adjustments to improve your brand image.
Brandwatch
If you’re looking for a powerful tool to help you monitor and analyze mentions, Brandwatch is definitely worth checking out. It offers many features that make it easy to see what people are saying about your brand online. For starters, you can use the platform to track mentions across all major social channels. Plus, the analytics dashboard makes it easy to see how your brand is performing and identify any potential issues. And if you need more detailed analysis, the platform also offers many tools to help you dig deeper into the data.
Mentionlytics
Mentionlytics is a media monitoring tool that combines keywords and social content to help you find new mentions and better understand your audience. The Social Intelligence Advisor is a unique AI feature that provides insights and recommendations based on your social data. Arguably the best alternative.
To Conclude
If you are searching for the ultimate social listening tool, Brand24 is exactly what you need.
This doesn’t just have your standard analytics, it also integrates hashtag searches competitor research, as well as sentiment analysis and mentions tracking.
It does so much more than you expect it to, and considering all of this, the price is incredible. Is it the best monitoring tool out there?
Yes. Do I give it my full endorsement and recommendation? Yes.
If you have used Brand24, or you are considering purchasing it, leave a comment to let me know your thoughts and feelings on this tool. Read my other online reviews as well!