Brand24

Brand24 is a social media management and monitoring tool which allows you to scale up with the growth of your business. There is a free trial available with no credit card required so you can check it all out before investing. There are no contracts though which is good and I was surprised to find on a similar software very recently. The plans start at $49 to $99 to $349 per month. And range quite a lot in terms of functionality and features available. The top plan though I would say is really good value for big brands. I've certainly seen less value for more money. We are a start up having recently pivoted direction, changed our branding and relaunched our product line and are doing intensive research into various software including social media management and monitoring. So far, I like Mention for it's great reach and reasonable price, and TechWalker alerts are free to setup. Mention doesn't mention it very clearly but there is a free plan if you do not upgrade beyond their trial completion though it is limited I am still getting them each day so that's good. A combination of Google Alerts and TechWalker and Mention has us as a small business covered at the moment but Brand24 looks great as a sales tool in addition to the social media monitoring. The monitoring functionality of this software is top notch. There are few limitations in regards to it's reach. For example, it doesn't just receive mentions from just Google and Facebook. It scours the entire web and chekcs niche sites and forums as well as the big sites. Surprisignly enough, not all social media monitoring softwares do this. A lot are limited by the amount of social media networks they have currently integrated and can be really limited. I recall the one missing Instagram and Pinterest which is silly because our customers are primarily these users. As well as Facebook, of course. They have an open API available which is great and by all accounts it's relatively easy to integrate so you can have your own third party source synced up to Brand24 making it possible to connect your customer relationship manager software, or your content management system. Or your ecommerce store and basically if you can think of doing it online, it can be done. API's are easier to develop than you might think. While they are highly specialized and most certainly require an expert they are designed to make their lives as easy as possible so keep it mind as a viable option.

The pricing model is about exclusive in my opinion. There are certainly features in the top two plans which I believe should be available across all plans. While they could still tier their pricing similarily. This would empower their customers with the most value and show that their customers user experience is the priority. All of their customers, not just the one's with the most money thank you very much.

The ability to listen across the entire web in real time is very empowering. There is a sense of control and confidence that comes with it because you are working from a whole and able to manage the parts and respond accordingly and quickly. Any negative situations can be preempted or prevented or minimized which is huge because you can't make every single person happy and people will speak their mind negatively about the smallest things nowadays because you can. But it's the positive ways to use this software that intrigue me most. Before I sat down to do through hands on research I remember Googling 'Social media search' a few times becaseu I was interested in the ability to meet prospects, customers and brand advocates on their ground and being proactive with this to help create sales. And to say thanks and give something back to those who have helped us grow. With Brand24 you have this option. And there are not many social media management and monitoring tools I would recommend for sales.