Report: Brandwatch Is Top Rated Social Monitoring Platform

In an always-on world, social media listening is a noisy process.

Therefore, many marketers turn to social media listening platforms that promise to help them effectively and productively turn the avalanche of social data into useful intelligence. Such platforms typically monitor keyword usage and brand mentions on the social Internet, giving business a window on consumer sentiment and the ability to react quickly to customer feedback.

It’s a crowded marketplace — this wiki lists 230 vendors and likely isn’t fully inclusive — but G2 Crowd is working to narrow it down a bit with its Spring 2015 report released this week.

And drawing from data from 400 reviews by business professionals, G2 Crowd ranked Brandwatch as the top rated social listening platform. Brandwatch was the only vendor to receive a “Leader” rating, which combines high user satisfaction with large market share.

Brandwatch, based in Brighton, England, received highest customer satisfaction score — 97 out of 100, normalized to the other 11 products rated — and was the second highest rated in terms of market share, after Radian6, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud tool.

G2 Crowd named seven “High Performers,” platforms with high customer satisfaction scores and smaller market presence: Viralheat, Geofeedia, Mention, Digimind Social, Crimson Hexagon, Synthesio and Radarly. Viralheat had the second highest satisfaction score of 85; Geofeedia was third at 80.

G2 Crowd lists 75 software vendors is the social monitoring category; only products with at least 10 reviews were included in the report.

Here’s G2 Crowd’s comparative Grid:

You can view a real-time version of the grid here.