At the start of 2022, Brandwatch started work on our first unified roadmap following our merger with Falcon.io. In the last six months, we have been busy continuing to develop each of our much-loved products and bringing them together as we embark on a mission to build the social suite of the future.

On day one of our merger, back in 2021, we launched Listen, a world-class social listening tool for powered by Brandwatch data and AI as a fully integrated product in our social media management solution. This year we've been continuing to develop a seamless experience across all the products in our suite to ensure all users of our products are enjoying the benefits of the technology that the new Brandwatch has to offer.

We also welcomed the team from Paladin to our growing family at Brandwatch and began integrating their end-to-end influencer marketing technology into our suite.

Here are some highlights delivered by our Research and Development team in 2022 so far across both our Social Media Management solution and our Consumer Intelligence solution.

Social Media Management

Official TikTok partners

In May, we announced that Brandwatch is now an official TikTok partner and revealed our first integrations with their brand-new Business Account API, allowing you to manage all of your TikTok accounts in Brandwatch:

  • Publish: Level up collaboration and content creation on TikTok. Create videos, collaborate with teams, schedule calendars, and publish on TikTok channels.
  • Engage: Handle incoming TikTok comments faster than ever before! Easily collaborate with teams and organize comments in Feeds. Interact in real time with customers and build deeper connections.
  • Measure: Forget manual reports and patched up screenshots. Get real-time reporting of owned posts and account-level metrics and easily compare them with other social media efforts, all in Measure dashboards.

Start telling your story and reaching the next generation of consumers on the world's most popular app.

Messenger Recurring Notifications

As Meta Business Partners, we were chosen to be launch partners for Recurring Notifications, a feature that enables you to send personalized messages to customers via Messenger.

Today, customers can initiate conversations with businesses, but have no easy way to receive personalized updates about topics they care about.

With Recurring Notifications, our customers can send personalized, engaging messages to customers via Messenger regarding different topics:

  • Promotions
  • Product alerts
  • Content
  • Events

This new feature is the modern way to engage users, a bit like newsletters … just way more effective and on a channel where today’s consumers spend more of their time.

New Instagram features

Reels

With Brandwatch, you can manage Instagram Reels across our social media management products:

  • Publish: collaborate on content and schedule your Reels
  • Engage: interact with followers and answer people’s comments
  • Measure: track the performance of your collective efforts.

Reels allow brands to reach a broader audience that goes well beyond a brand’s follower base. Why? Because while people only see posts and Stories from the accounts they follow, Reels show content from all Instagram accounts based on what people are most interested in.

What’s more, we added support for Instagram Reels as a video format in our Benchmark product, allowing you to compare performance of your videos with competitors. And Reels can now be tracked in Consumer Research, expanding your social listening capabilities.

Stories and Carousels

The team launched a highly requested feature by our customers: the option to publish Instagram Carousels directly from Publish. Also, it's now possible to see Instagram Stories and Carousels posted natively in Publish.

LinkedIn Personal Profiles

You can now connect your Personal LinkedIn accounts to Brandwatch and publish posts, just like you do with LinkedIn Pages. Manage your CEO's or senior managers’ accounts from Publish and reach your targeted audience with a more human touch.

New Advertise flow

The Advertise team has worked hard this year to revamp the Campaign, Ad Set, and Ad flows. They have also completely revamped the promotion flow in Publish, enabling you to more easily boost your organic posts, resulting in a new, intuitive, and more user-friendly ads creation flow between Advertise and Publish.

This update makes ad creation process faster, seamless, and more flexible. Users can create campaigns and add ad sets and ads to them at later stage, or they can do them all at once with the updated version of the flow.

Smarter engagement

In our Engage product, we replaced the old sentiment model with Brandwatch Consumer Research’s state-of-the-art multilingual sentiment analysis. This new model is more accurate, supports more languages, and is now consistent across all our solutions.

The Engage team also added the option to share Response Templates across Teams and Channels for easier collaboration within and across your teams. They also updated the View Only role on a channel-basis to provide more granular control of user access.

Influence Shopify integration

In March, we proudly announced that we were acquiring the influencer marketing platform Paladin. Users of this product can now log in with their Brandwatch credentials, and all of our social media management customers have free access to its influencer discover tool.

We're continuing to integrate Influence with the rest of our suite, but also building exciting new features for the Influence product itself.

In August, we released an integration with Shopify Analytics, making it easier to sell your products through influencers and to measure ROI.

With this integration, you can measure key performance indicators like total sales, value per order, and transactions per influencer, find out which products sell the most through your collaborating influencers, uncover sales trends and spot new opportunities for product expansions, and identify more influencers that can drive sales for you.

Consumer Intelligence

Facebook and Instagram coverage

Reels

We added coverage of Reels for both owned and non-owned Business Accounts and via hashtags tracking in Brandwatch Consumer Research, allowing you to monitor these popular videos across Instagram.

New Data Management interface

Last year, we made several improvements to help you get the best historical and ongoing Facebook and Instagram coverage.

This year, we've been building a brand-new, user-friendly interface to help you manage your tokens and keep track of the pages, accounts, and hashtags you’re tacking and make sure you’re getting the best coverage possible.

You can now add new authentication tokens and targeted data more easily, and even bulk upload Facebook pages you want to track. Our pre-built lists of top pages make it simple to boost coverage for key industries as well.

Powerful search tools

Insights are only as good as the data you are drawing them from. That's why it's critical for our users to be able to write high-quality queries to collect the data they need to analyze.

This year we've been adding several powerful enhancements to how Queries are built in Consumer Research to help even beginner users get to the data they need quickly and easily.

AI-Powered search

This highly popular feature in our quick search tool has now been brought into the Query builder. Now when you start typing, you can select a recognized entity and let our AI find relevant mentions for you, whether you're analyzing a brand with a common word as its name or you want to search for conversations about a broad topic like 'running' or 'the environment'.

This speeds up the query writing process, gives you access to more historical data, and enables you to combine your AI terms with Social Panels and Image Search.

Tracked Facebook Pages

A new panel in the Query allows you to include all Facebook comments and posts from any page, not just those matching your keywords.

By utilizing this new feature, you'll get a complete picture of all conversations around a brand or competitor, so you can understand the full context of the topic.

Word Cloud preview

This helps you improve the data quality of queries by letting you more easily identify and remove irrelevant data, producing both insightful and reliable insights.

New segmentation workflow

Get to the valuable insights faster with our new categories and tags workflow.

Segmenting your data is arguably the most important step for turning large amounts of unstructured data into valuable insights.

Brandwatch has offered market leading segmentation capabilities for over a decade. But it can be hard to master and takes a long time to set up properly. So we have made it easier. In the past, creating a category with five segments took 83 clicks. In the new interface, it takes just 23.

With the new and intuitive segmentation UI, it's easier than ever before to group your data into the categories that you care about and to get to the underlying insights that matter to your business right now.

Reddit Insights

We've continued to improve how you can visualize and surface insights from our full firehose coverage of Reddit data. Now you can chart over time by Total Reddit Score, Karma, and Total Subreddits. You can also break down your data over time by the top subreddits conversations are appearing in.

Brandwatch Reviews

Brandwatch Reviews is a powerful tool for understanding what customers think of your products and competitors. Now we have an enhanced integration allowing you to easily import Reviews data into Brandwatch Consumer Research.

Search for reviews of products, brands, or categories, and auto generate queries from the results in Brandwatch Consumer Research. Auto upload all your data from Reviews to analyze it alongside your social and online data reporting.

It has been a busy first half of the year! And there's plenty more in store for 2022, as we continue to build an ever more connected suite of products and bring some exciting new developments to Brandwatch.