Creating brands is the first step to getting valuable insights on your and your competitors’ social strategies in Benchmark. Learn about Benchmark brands and how to set them up successfully.

What is a brand in Benchmark?

In Benchmark, a brand is a collection of social channels, owned by you or your competitors. Benchmark enables you to create custom brands to analyze a selection of channels’ metrics and content to gauge their performance. With brands, learn how your and your competitors’ social presence and content are performing across multiple channels.

Creating a brand

In Benchmark, it is necessary to create Brands to identify which collections of channels you would like to analyze in Benchmark’s dashboards. Brands are created within the Benchmark > Brands menu under your Social Media Management Settings.

To set up a brand in Benchmark:

1. While in the Benchmark, click on the Manage settings (gear) icon in the lower-left corner of Social Media Management, then click Organization admin.

   Tip:

   If you are in the Benchmark app, you'll see a Benchmark admin option in the Manage settings (gear icon) menu that will navigate you to Benchmark's Brands settings directly.

2. From the left-hand Administration sidebar, select Benchmark > Brands. The following menu will display your list of brands in Benchmark. Click on the blue Create Brand button in the top-right corner.
3. Name your Brand, and then click Save and Continue.
4. The following tab will allow you to select which channels you would like to add to your Brand. Click the blue Add Channel button to start adding channels.
5. Use the search bar to search for channels to add. Use the respective network icon toggles to toggle between searching for channels on different networks.
   

   Note:

   When searching for Facebook channels, you may search for the Facebook Page name or the handle name. When searching for Instagram channels, you must search by the exact Instagram handle name, or the channel will not come up in search.

6. After you have added Channels, your number of available channel slots will update and display at the top of the menu. To add your selected channels, click the Add Channel button at the bottom of the menu.
7. Once confirmed, your channels will display under your newly created brand and show the Network, Channel name and profile icon, Fans count, Channel handle/username, Channel indexing status, and Data availability date.
   

   Note:

   Newly added channels may temporarily show an indexing status of “Indexing” while Benchmark is retrieving your data. To learn more about indexing statuses and channels in Benchmark, visit our article on Managing Benchmark Channels.

8. To finalize your Brand, use the Mark as My Brand toggle at the top of your brand to identify to Benchmark that this Brand should be analyzed as your owned brand, rather than as a competitor. This option should be selected for any Brand where you have selected channels that you own. Any brands marked as “My Brand” will be indicated with a crown icon in the Settings: Brands menu. If you leave the Mark as My Brand toggle unselected, it will be identified as a competitor in Benchmark.
   

   Note:

   The Brand Insights Dashboard and Content Analysis Dashboard in Benchmark contain a built-in feature to compare data from your brands against your competitors’ brands. This is indicated as Compare “Brand” vs. “Brand” in the header of each dashboard, and your brands will be indicated by a crown icon in each of the corresponding dashboard widgets.

Managing team access to a brand

At any time via the Brands menu in Administration, you can restrict team access to a brand by clicking the pencil icon in the brand under the Team access column. Once clicked, you can type to filter for and select the specific team you would like to have access to the brand.