Talkwalker Review (2024)

Talkwalker (which begins at $800 per month for the Basic plan) is a comprehensive social listening platform solution with an emphasis on social media analytics. It serves the needs of both the small to midsize business (SMB) market as well as larger enterprise customers. Talkwalker puts online, social media, print, TV, and radio content analytics at the disposal of managers. This comprehensive social listening tool monitors real-time global coverage of media in 187 languages. It has built a following as a tool to use when looking to track a brand's reputation in a wide variety of ways, making it our Editors' Choice pick in our social media management review roundup.

Talkwalker isn't the solution to consider if your business needs social media publishing and scheduling features. There are other products that excel in this department, including Buffer Publish and Editors' Choice pick Sprout Social ($149 Per User Per Month at Sprout Social) as well as plucky upstarts such as Loomly and Planable, which focus on post creation, scheduling, and publishing.

But Talkwalker is unique because it is laser-focused on tracking and monitoring brand mentions and measuring sentiment from a gamut of sources. These include over 10 social networks, 150 million websites, and the ability to track 30,000 brand logos appearing in videos and images online. Talkwalker has integration capabilities that allow it to be meshed with a variety of tools, including social publishing and business intelligence (BI) tools, such as Tableau Desktop (Visit Store at Tableau) , for even deeper analytical operations.

From a social monitoring perspective, Talkwalker packs fairly in-depth analytics features when it comes to brand listening and influencer monitoring, hashtag and campaign tracking, crisis management, competitor analysis, and advanced metrics across social channels. Sentiment analysis is also extensive with the technology now capable of identifying sarcasm and irony.

Talkwalker can even collate emoji from social media in relation to brands or topics and derive sentiment analysis from them. Talkwalker is also the only tool tested that has review trackers, which can mine review websites, newsgroups, and even websites like TripAdvisor or app stores like Google Play or iOS App Store to gather relevant insight and sentiment, which can be valuable to some businesses.

Since we last looked at it, Talkwalker's user interface (UI), reporting, and sentiment analysis capabilities have improved and expanded. They have also added artificial intelligence (AI) by way of their proprietary AI engine, which is used in various ways. One particular area where AI works wonders is for sentiment analysis and being able to identify sarcasm and irony. Talkwalker now lets clients create their own custom AI models for more targeted tracking, and it can effectively measure sentiment from data sets.

Improvements to interactive data visualization features, return-on-investment (ROI) metrics, influencer management, and image recognition have helped it bridge the gap and serve use cases on both the cheaper SMB end, and the slightly more expensive offerings with better enterprise value. As long as analytics is what you're after, there's very little that Talkwalker straight up can't do, and what it does, it does well.

Additionally, the company has also added "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWIG) reporting as well as a quick search option to its UI. While larger enterprises still might want something more comprehensive offers, it's nice to see that Talkwalker has been so responsive to feedback from its customers.

Since we last looked at it, Talkwalker has expanded its capabilities and added what they are calling the "first and only video recognition tool in the industry." Unfortunately, pricing has also increased and now costs $800 per month for the Basic tier.

Talkwalker says that AI-driven video recognition can detect 300 percent more brand mentions than text monitoring alone. For companies that require this sort of detailed social listening and highly targeted brand tracking beyond social media and transcending towards print, TV, and radio, this is the only solution of its kind.

Pricing and Setup

Talkwalker has a Free Search plan suited more like a trial for an individual user without access to any real analytics capabilities, but for businesses, the entry price is $800 per month for Talkwalker's Basic plan. Talkwalker Corporate and Talkwalker Enterprise subscriptions are available but pricing will vary depending on customer's requirements. The analytics functionality for all three is the same; to Talkwalker's credit, the company doesn't bar businesses from any features in different tiers and doesn't cap users, alerts, or the number of topics (containing multiple keywords) you can monitor, either. The differences in pricing tiers come down to capacity and scale.

The new Image Recognition feature for images and videos is only included in the Enterprise account but can be added as an extra for Corporate accounts, if necessary. SMBs might not require the deep image analytics, but growth stage startups or brands who are marketing on a global and multi-media scale will benefit from being able to track logos and products across a variety of channels and only Talkwalker can offer it in this scale and variety.

Talkwalker Basic gives you a limit of 10,000 new monthly results, or social data the dashboard returns per month. Talkwalker Corporate bumps that to 100,000 results, and Talkwalker Enterprise to one million. The other differences lie in data storage and customer service. The Basic plan gives you only a year's worth of data storage and a year of on-demand historical data access. The Corporate plan offers two years of each, and the Enterprise plan harbors unlimited storage but still only two years of historical access. The maximum of two years' historical data access could become limiting the longer a company is invested in the platform. As far as customer service, only the Corporate and Enterprise plans get account management and support.

Setting up a Talkwalker project dashboard is quick and fairly painless. On the Home screen, you're presented with the main tabs for Analytics and Reports & Alerts. There are seven pre-built dashboards for quick monitoring and common use cases called Talkwalker IQ Apps: Brand Listening, Crisis, Hashtag Tracking, Social Channel Analytics, Competitive Intelligence, Campaign Monitoring, and Content Analytics. I'll detail each of these further down.

For custom dashboards, you begin by setting up the topics, channels, custom filters, and events by which a project's analytics will be distilled. When adding topics, you can add multiple basic keywords or write a detailed query if you know Boolean logic. You can also click on the detailed search syntax option for a list of Boolean operators and special transformations to narrow and specify the search, which crawls mentions across the Web. This page, which takes you into the Talkwalker Academy user manual, also offers a handy list of URL parameters, metrics, and geographic restrictions, and special query modifiers on searches. For the most technically minded users who are fluent in Boolean logic and want the capability to craft a detailed social query by hand, I found the functionality extremely useful. Custom filters allow you to refine results with even more Boolean operators and assign those filters to specific groups of keywords. For everyone else, the setup works just fine with normal keywords. You can also assign each topic a color, which is how you'll be able to identify it later in graphs and charts.

Talkwalker has also improved its search and querying with a new automated content tagging function that allows users to create specific rules to organize results. For example, users can set importance scores for results based on the inclusion of crisis keywords such as "failure, broken, scandal," etc, and automatically assign teams to respond. Tagging can also be used to automatically change sentiment scores if default sentiment tagging is tricked by the prevalence of negative keywords in a campaign. To make complex searches easier to parse, the platform also now offers tips for forming search queries when putting together a social search, with a quick preview box showing how the results will look.

Next, you set up Channels, which give you deeper analytics on specific networks and Web pages. These allow you to monitor the results of your queries on specific social networks, specific user accounts, or even simply regular Web pages by entering any URL. When adding a channel, you can pick from the major social networks including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and many others, or copy/paste a specific URL to a user's profile page on any of those networks. Events allow you to measure analytics over a predefined time period. The Talkwalker custom dashboard process can take a while to complete if you're setting complex keyword and channel combinations.

Analytics and Reporting

Talkwalker's main analytics UI breaks down all the major social metrics—reach, engagement, mentions, sentiment, and the likes, comments, retweets, shares, and so on across various social networks and sources. The UI provides a combination of interactive graphical elements and post feeds with a selection of grouping and sorting options by various metrics, and each tab has a sub-menu to compare by media type, sentiment, countries/regions, languages, gender, or Talkwalker's Smart Themes.

Smart Themes allow business users to add additional elements including specific brands or companies or emotions and attitudes to the social topics being measured. Some of the Smart Theme options offered include appeal, reliability, quality, packaging, exclusivity, design, usability, and functionality. I found the Smart Themes one of the most useful aspects of Talkwalker, particularly when combining its top-down filtering on a theme like the quality of a particular brand with Boolean logic-driven queries. Other platforms do more of the work for you, but Talkwalker is a great platform for social data nerds looking for the tools to dive headfirst into the data themselves.

The most recent additions to the platform are a major boon for improved analytics and reporting. New proprietary image recognition gives Talkwalker the ability to crawl brand logos and images and match those with the 30,000 logos in its UI. There is also a recent Crimson Hexagon addition—to identify non-text brand mentions and help gauge ROI on sponsored logo-based campaigns. On the subject of ROI metrics, Talkwalker takes a step forward by adding the ability to overlay sales data, sponsor spend, marketing spend, etc directly onto Talkwalker graphs within the platform using custom indicators.

Talkwalker's basic social reach, engagement, and performance results display mostly in simple interactive line graphs and data tables, with some bar graphs and pie charts thrown in. Clicking on the "…" option next to each graph gives you a few different basic chart type options. There is a speed gauge graphic used for showing mentions, engagement, and reach over time, but the platform's most visible feature updates have come in the data visualization department.

The Demographics tab was useful for breaking down a company's international social audience by country and language using bar charts, along with a fun click-and-drag world map to show follower demographics or conversation share with different-sized circles around the world. In breaking down audiences and influencers, Talkwalker has also added new influencer tables and new sorting options for sentiment and engagement per mention. Talkwalker also redesigned its influencer dashboard to show the most active and influential users in a separate graphic above the chart, and added a new influencer drill-down feature to cross-reference the users with different themes and metrics, including pulling in data from their Facebook or Twitter bio.

Reports and alerts are set and generated from a specific analytics page or dashboard. In the pop-out box next to a given graph or chart, Talkwalker gives you the option to add that element to a report, add to another custom dashboard, export in various formats including PDF, CSV, XLS, or PowerPoint, or embed either in Facebook, Twitter, or as a PNG. When generating a report, I was able to drag and drop chart widgets I added to the report within one of the pre-set templates I loaded, add descriptions and filters for those widgets, and also add graphical elements like company logos into the report.

There are a few small buttons in the top right corner of each tab as well, to add that entire page to a report and to set an email alert to specific recipients. Alerts can be triggered either by new results, irregular activity over a specific time period, or a spike in the data of a particular metric. Real-time alerts and users are unlimited, as opposed to the limits and quotas set in social analytics platforms like Brand24.

To go with its depth when setting query parameters, Talkwalker has also made some much-needed improvements to its sentiment analysis. Beyond the basic positive, negative, or neutral sentiment in a red, yellow, and green pie chart, Talkwalker's improved sentiment capabilities behind the scenes include neural networks, machine translation, automatic feedback loops, and settings to fully automate sentiment with rules and triggers.

Talkwalker's sentiment analysis can dive into what's driving positivity or negativity towards a brand, the platform can parse context-sensitive sentiment analysis. Layering on Smart Themes gives the sentiment greater depth in specified reports, and the sentiment of individual posts or users can be manually overridden by changing the color of the flag marking each one in the Results or Influencers feed. Again, Smart Themes are really where Talkwalker shines. In a feature like Talkwalker's word cloud, adding Smart Themes and filters around specific brands, people, and emotions is where the platform's true value shows.

Comparative Advantage

If deployed properly, Talkwalker can provide social media managers a 360° view of any brand, company, or industry; with historical access to 100 percent of tweets, major social networks, and 150 million websites, print sources, and now a 30,000+ logo database thanks to its visual search functionality.

For companies in very competitive businesses, this augments their BI as well as allows them to track how their competitors are faring in their own brand and social media campaigns.

For the typical business user logging into Talkwalker for a specific use case, the IQ Apps are likely where they'll spend the majority of their time. The key to these prefab dashboards is the easily understandable context of the social use case. In the Brand Listening dashboard you're presented with the same gauges and graphs around mentions, engagement, reach, influencers, and sentiment as in the analytics tab, but the elements are broken into sections with headings such as "How much conversation is there online?" or "What is the tone of the conversation?" The data is framed with the same sort of questions in the Hashtag Tracking IQ App and the Content Analytics IQ App, the latter of which brings up a post feed from different social networks colored by questions including "Which posts are driving the most interest in my industry?" and "Who are the industry's leading voices?" Talkwalker has also added more data sources, now incorporating Twitter Likes; additional data for Instagram and YouTube, including engagement rates, activity peaks, overall audience; LinkedIn page analytics, as well as data from Russian social network VKontakte (VK).

IQ Apps are also great for competitive benchmarking. The Content Analytics and Social Channel Analytics apps include competitive benchmarking against a competing brand's social presences, and I found the Competitive Intelligence app extremely useful in comparing two specific Twitter profiles, Facebook pages, or Instagram accounts on follower/like growth and engagement. Competitive benchmarking is one of Talkwalker's strongest areas—it devotes the better part of three IQ Apps to it.

Talkwalker's query depth and hands-on data tools are extremely comprehensive, making it an appealing choice for social curators and data analysts within a business who are looking for the freedom to experiment with data. Talkwalker also offers an open-source application programming interface (API) and framework to develop custom integrations. And for social publishing, Talkwalker has a partnership with Hootsuite ($99 Per Month at HootSuite) .

The toughest riddle with Talkwalker is figuring out where it's best suited. SMBs may balk at spending even $800 per month for a social analytics platform when a product such as Brand24's most expensive tier, its Professional plan, is half that amount. Buffer Publish (Visit Site at Buffer) and Sprout Social give you the publishing capabilities without having to pay for Hootsuite's Professional plan through Talkwalker's integration.

If your business can find a sweet spot in Talkwalker's pricing and capabilities, then its IQ Apps and deep data filtering chops, and unique image search functionality may make it worth considering. Its ability to track vast streams of analytics data from so many disparate sources and integrate them neatly into a highly visual and actionable dashboard is unparalleled. A mature mix of features and layered feature set sees Talkwalker retain our Editors' Choice selection in social media management and analytics.