Social listening for small business is a popular soap box for me. It seems every time a good social listening tool comes along, they get funding and immediately drop reasonable pricing to target the enterprise, thus leaving the small business owner behind. Each time I find a new platform with pricing small businesses can digest, I get excited.
Brand24 has me excited. It’s a fairly complete social listening competitor with a $49 price point (for five topic searches). Five more will move you to the $99 plan. The “enterprise” solution is just $399. So we’re starting off on a foot I can get worked up about — a social listening for small business price.
I recently test drove Brand24 and have to say — It’s damn good. Not only is the user experience intuitive and simple, but the data it returns appears to be thorough and on par with other, more expensive tools. The ability to filter results by channel, sentiment and date is followed on my easy filters for domains, authors, types of interactions (likes, comments, shares) and more. You can search within a project and filter down by subtopics and other keywords, too.
Perhaps the most exciting thing about Brand24 is the reporting feature. So long as your data is satisfactory in the tool, one click and you’ve got a colorful infographic of the top data points (see below) or a PDF report that has more depth you can share internally, with clients, etc. Social listening for small business has to be easy. Reporting here is super simple.
Brand24 was largely built and is run out of Wroclaw, Poland, but has a U.S. base in Gainesville, Fla., and is making headway into the social listening market in the states. Their European pedigree is an advantage, however. My testing has shown a good deal of versatility in handling different languages.
The bottom line on Brand24 is your basic social listening functions are covered. Many advanced social listening outputs are possible if you know what you’re doing. But as with any social listening platform, the data is noisy and needs culling. Though Brand24’s data is pulled mostly by its own spiders along with standard search APIs, theirs doesn’t appear to be any more or less powerful than what your search variables can do in any tool.
It may just be that the efficiency of your data selection with social listening will always be dependent on that mass between the keyboard and the chair.
The great news about Brand24 is that you can test drive it for free for 14 days without ponying up a credit card. So what’s stopping you? Go try it out and report back your experience. I, for one, think this is a valuable new competitor on the social listening front. If they can keep their prices steady and the tool advancing, they may wind up being a challenger brand the big boys wind up fearing.
Note: This is not a sponsored post. Brand24 provided me with a complimentary account to review the software. I have no stake or financial interest in the company.