Brandwatch Launches 'Social Panels' Feature

Brighton, UK-based social media analyst Brandwatch has added a feature called Social Panels to its consumer research platform, to enable researchers to build panels and focus groups from authors on the most frequently used social media platforms.

Brandwatch, which merged with competitor Crimson Hexagon two years ago and bought survey company Qriously last year, archives millions of social media conversations each day and provides users with tools to analyse them. The new Social Panels feature allows users to upload a custom list of authors from a range of content sources, enabling researchers to combine various demographic filters to identify the right group of people.

From this point, the panels can be used to filter social media conversations within the firm's platform, to uncover insights across subject matter by seeing how a defined audience discusses any given topic. Then researchers can benchmark panels against each other, and against the general population. Historical conversations within the panel can also be analysed.

Chief Product Officer Rebecca Carson (pictured) comments: 'We built Social Panels not only to provide robust, representative unprompted insight from social (media) data, but to completely challenge the notion of traditional demographics. The modern consumer demands personalization, and to provide this we need to go way beyond segmenting populations with limiting labels like age, gender, and socioeconomic status. We need to understand what motivates a group of people, what drives their passions, and to discover their real, unprompted behaviour patterns'.

Web site: www.brandwatch.com .