We have been keeping ourselves busy working on our social media monitoring tool since our last product update. Here is a summary of the recent additions to the application.

First, Brandwatch now has full, customisable categorisation capabilities. As a client you can define your own set of categories (for example, your own Priority levels, Business Units, types of mentions, etc), using the Setup widget.

These categories can be used to tag individual mentions, within the Mentions component. This tagging can then be used to generate many types of graphs using the Chart component. This is useful if you are conducting ongoing monitoring of a Brand or Product, and want to analyse new mentions as they come up in your workspaces. It is also useful if you want to conduct market research using data from previous months, and want to manually refine and enrich the data for a report.

The second addition is a related one: we have made it much easier to tag, categorise and analyse mentions thanks to a totally revamped Single Mention View. To see it in action, open a Mentions component, and click on the title of any mention. This will open the Single Mention View, where you can see the actual web page as well as the new work area at the top.

That work area contains useful information about the mention (including influence metrics, location) as well as widgets to tag and categorise the mention, add notes, set the sentiment, etc. The Single Mention View can be used by a single user to inspect just a few mentions, or by a whole team tasked with manually analysing thousands of mentions. In the later case, you can mark mentions as ‘Checked’ as you go along, to avoid rechecking the same mention again later, and/or to graph only ‘checked’ mentions in other components.

Third, we have addressed the main usability issue of the Brandwatch dashboard, by removing the multiple scrollbars which sometimes were getting in the way. The dashboard components are now smarter and make a better use of the space available to them in the browser window.

Finally, we have improved the speed of the system thanks to several hardware upgrades and software optimisations. You should notice that the dashboard is more responsive now, particularly if you are using large datasets.