Today, we’re launching Twitter Channels, which gives Brandwatch users the ability to track any public Twitter account.

It’s the second of our Channels that we’ve released so far; we launched Facebook Channels back in May, and there are more in the pipeline! 

The idea behind Channels is to allow in-depth owned media monitoring alongside the powerful earned media tracking we’ve long been known for.

We found that our clients wanted to be able to track their own channels – such as their Twitter accounts or Facebook page – as well as collect mentions of their brand from across the web. We listened, and Channels was born.

We made this video all about what drove us to make it:

Channels doesn’t require any admin rights, which means that you can compare your channels to those of your competitors or even to those in other industries.

We detailed here what Facebook Channels could do, so let’s take a look at Twitter Channels now.

Twitter Channels

So, what does it do? Well, it tracks every tweet from and to your specified Twitter account(s), as well as key metrics about the Channel, such as impressions, retweets and followers, plus much more.

The Twitter Channels Dashboard presents this data for you in a variety of useful components and breakdowns, and lets you dive in to the data behind the numbers.

What’s more, it also highlights which of your and your audience’s tweets are most impactful, as well as the tweeters in your community that have the most impact.

The Twitter Channels default dashboard is set up to give you instant insights into your Twitter community, with a range of handy tabs:

• Analytics – a simple overview of all the key metrics about the channel, including those metrics over time, including tweets by owner and audience, retweets, @replies, @mentions, impressions and net/total followers.

• Owner activity – see which of your/the channel’s tweets had the most impact so you can measure which content is most effective.

• Audience activity – see which tweets and tweeters mentioning your channel have the most impact so that you can respond quickly, understand potential crises and emerging trends, and identify the influencers chatting about your brand.

• Location – see where in the world people are tweeting about you with our mentions map, so that you can understand which markets your content is resonating in and where your community lies.

• Topics – understand at a glance what people are talking about when mentioning your brand with our useful topics cloud. More than just a word cloud, the topics cloud intelligently identifies key topics within the chatter.

• All tweets – see the full text, alongside key metadata, of all the tweets from and to your channel, allowing for your own analysis, mark up etc.

It also includes our super useful Twitter Insights component, which gives you a deeper understanding of the stories, tweeters, emoticons and hashtags being most talked about by your community.

Not to mention that you can segment everything by all our usual filters, including our Twitter gender and account type filters too, so you can really understand your audience.

Of course, the dashboard is completely flexible and customisable, or you can create your own custom dashboard from scratch and plug your Channels into any of our other components to get the insights you need.

Owned vs. Earned

Tracking your owned media means that you can track it alongside your earned media, helping you to further understand and track the relationship between the two.

All of this adds up to plenty of social media insights that you can use to forward your community and brand management, to optimise your content strategy and to measure your brand reputation and market share.

The result? A more social business, better results, and better informed decisions.

There’s plenty more you can do with Twitter Channels – get in touch with us if you’d like more information.