The Brandwatch social media listening tool has been around for quite a few years. It has received numerous revisions and additional components like Vizia and the newly released Signals alerting system.
This walk-through deals with setting up and extracting data from the main Brandwatch listening tool. A good place to start is the Project selection page where you can either choose an existing project or start a new one.
If you are starting a new project then select Data and the Queries from the left-hand column to create a new search query.
For a new project select New query. By default the system accepts Boolean search terms. More on that in a bit.
The page is split into two sides. On the left is where you input your query string. On the right is an initial listing of what the query is returning.
If you are not familiar with these types of queries they can seem a bit daunting. I would recommended you look at the ever-present Brandwatch help pages (link bottom left) which also includes a number of examples search strings, which can be adapted. Alternatively there are two links: Operators (a crib of the various search terms available) and Locations (referring to how you can restrict searches by geographical region).
To test your query is finding what you want it to, press the Test Query button. If it is okay it will bring up a list of matching hits on the right hand side of the page.
It is recommended that you spend a bit of time examining a selection of the mentions in this preview to establish their relevance. It is far easier to revise the query now, to omit irrelevant items or widen the capture, (e.g. alternative spellings) than it is to do during the reporting stage.
It would be very easy to do a whole tutorial just on query string construction. Newbies would really benefit from reading up on this and the Brandwatch help pages are invaluable.
Once you are happy, give your query a name and a description and indicate the relevant industry sector. Then save it.
This will bring you back to the query set-up page again where you will see your new query you created listed.
Select the option to View in Dashboard which will open by default covering the previous seven days.
To adjust the date period shown select Filters on the right hand top drop-down bar.
This Filter bar is available on all the pre-set Reports and Mentions options making up the grey tabs to the top left hand side of the screen.
As mentioned, this Filter bar allows you to change the date range as well as filter for media groups like Twitter and Facebook, etc. It also contains invaluable workflow filters which are useful if you want to manually check categorisation on a selection of clips.
The grey tabs at the top of the page lay out the main preformatted report templates. It also includes a full article listing in the Mentions tab. Do note if you change any filter or date range on one of the tabs it will not automatically carry across to the other tab/reports.
By default Brandwatch searches go back to the start of the previous month. It is possible to add in older coverage in the form of a backfill, however this usually comes with an additional charge.
These Report selection tabs feature by default the most popular tables and graphs, notably the top media sources, authors and word clouds. These pre-set tables, graphs and charts are customisable. Different metrics can be selected and once you are happy with the report the data can be exported to a spreadsheet. Configured Report views can also be shared electronically with colleagues.
Brandwatch takes a bit of user effort, but it does reward users with a framework for clear media analysis. Personally, I particularly like experimenting with the various influencer metrics.
While no listening tool is perfect, in this busy space Brandwatch is viewed as one of the more capable capture and analysis tools.
