Best practice for monitoring news and social content

Here we’ll take you through best practice for monitoring news and social content.

Choose a fixed price solution

There are many media monitoring tools available today and it’s easy for you to end up with a number of tools that have extremely limited use cases. Paying for individual searches gets expensive when you have separate tools for social media, print, broadcast. It just isn’t good enough.

Replace your numerous monitoring tools with a single provider that can cover all the bases. You need to find a tool that offers unlimited search and a wide array of media sources. So, in the long run, you can consolidate your media monitoring efforts and outgoing finances.

Discover relevant stories in real-time

It’s safe to say there’s a lot of noise in today’s 24-hour media cycle. It’s hard to narrow down what’s important to your brand. And that’s the case even when don’t have to wait hours for the results from your queries.

To be truly effective you need to be able to filter out the noise and single out important stories. Finding content that’s important to you, your brand, and your clients, is easier using real-time alerts.

You need to find a tool that offers a real-time alert system. But that’s just the minimum, it needs to be quick to set up and easy to onboard your staff onto. Most importantly, filters that eliminate irrelevant content and deliver timely relevant articles are a necessity.

Track what’s important to your brand

Having the right tool is useless if you’re not using it correctly. Misusing your media tracking services is like using a toothbrush to comb your hair. Use your media monitoring tool to track what actually matters for your company.

Effective use can help you safeguard your brand’s reputation and gauge public opinion via social media listening. You can also utilise it to keep spokespeople on-brand and conducting media training using quote detection.

Use specific keywords for different purposes

We’ve told you to track what matters, but how do you do that? Keywords.

Using specific keywords can be a game-changer for your reports and insights. These keywords should be vary for each project, PR campaign, or point of interest for your brand.

As a result, it is vital that your media monitoring tool enables you to set up a large variety of searches. Quality data makes a crucial difference and leads to quality media tracking.

Monitor keywords related to competitors and the industry

A major benefit of media monitoring is your ability to know what your competition is doing. Never again will you be blind-sided by a new feature announcement or competitor product. With intelligent media listening in place, you’ll be aware of feature releases, new hires, or event sponsorships. Importantly, you’ll be able to react (or not) in a timely and appropriate fashion.

Sometimes your competitors won’t warrant monitoring. In this case, you can monitor keywords relating to your industry and track trade publications to get a step ahead. That way you can stay on top of articles by industry influencers, new trends, regulatory changes, and threats to your industry. This knowledge equips you with leverage for your company’s gain.

Use real-time alerts and email notifications

Whether it’s mobile app notifications or delivered via email, real-time alert systems are crucial. Being the first to know what’s happening allows you to get ahead of a crisis. It also allows you to be the one to deliver good news to key stakeholders.

It’s difficult to stay on top of the media today. Even if you spent hours on news aggregators you could miss vital articles and numerous social media mentions. This is why it’s vital to track relevant keywords through real-time, hourly, or daily alerts.

Every business needs to be ready to receive breaking news when it breaks. With important news delivered to you fresh off the press, alerts are easy to scan and collate into reports.

Extract valuable insights 

Even with a perfect media monitoring strategy, it can be overwhelming to have an abundance of data available. A media monitoring tool that delivers relevant, actionable insights is key. These insights can inform an understanding of trends in how your brand is discussed in the media. They also enable you to discover the events, topics, and influencers driving your news.

Insights can help you visualise breaking news and track your campaigns to see where your message is making its mark. Geographic breakdowns make it even easier to judge your penetration in new markets. Being able to draw comparisons between your coverage and competitors’ can reveal where you’re pulling ahead or falling behind.

For deeper analysis of insights, an export to CSV feature is ideal. This functionality allows you to bring information into your favourite data visualisation tool. Here it can be combined with internal data sets to unearth unrivalled intelligence and insights.

Create reports for key stakeholders 

It’s not always easy to prove the value of PR activities to the C-Suite.

Media monitoring tools aid you in shining a spotlight on your efforts. By utilising the insights from your media tracking, you can to generate reports of measurable results. Showcasing the value of your hard work.

Being able to measure the effectiveness of campaigns prevents questioning of the necessity of a PR team. This proves to key stakeholders just how valuable you are.

Integrate your platform

Media intelligence doesn’t work in a vacuum, having data without a means to use it just doesn’t make any sense. Integrate your media monitoring insights with the apps and platforms that you use daily.

Even when they’re working externally, it’s important to maximise your team’s productivity and keep them in the know. Set up an automatic RSS feed to deliver hyper-relevant news into your intranet or third-party tools like Slack and Salesforce.

Improve your brand’s content by pushing relevant stories onto your website, CMS, or blogging platform. This will augment your own editorial content with on-topic news stories and industry-relevant announcements across a wide spectrum of sources.

Monitoring news and social content: key takeaway

Of course, the best practice of all is finding the solution that works for your brand. With so many media monitoring tools available it can be daunting to pick one yourself.

Our advice is to choose a media monitoring tool that can augment your team, deliver actionable insights, and keep you in the know.