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Time and resources are limited across any team or business, which is why it’s important to focus efforts on only the most specialised tasks. There are so many day-to-day tasks that are crucial for PR teams, such as media monitoring and social media management. But in the age of automation, there are always better – and less time exhaustive – ways to do them.
1. Stop manually posting on social media
Unless you’re live-tweeting an event, you have no excuse to be manually posting on social media in 2019. Typing out each individual post over the course of the day takes up more screen-time than you think. The average social post has a lifetime of 90min – so you have to do a lot to make an impact. There’s so much to consider: managing multiple accounts, attaching images, picking the right hashtags, tagging relevant influencers and companies. And if you’re on Twitter, ensuring your post is under 280 characters.
Manual posting can also adversely break up the day and distract you from more pressing tasks. There’s nothing more annoying than having to stop what you’re doing over and over again – a guaranteed loss to concentration – to post something on LinkedIn or send a tweet out.
It takes about 25 minutes to refocus on a task after being distracted, according to Gloria Mark, expert in digital distraction at the University of California, Irvine. Now imagine stopping what you’re doing to manually post on social media five times a day. That’s over two hours a day wasted on trying to get back to concentrating on your original task!
This is where scheduling posts can save you time and stress.
Platforms such as Buffer and Hootsuite allow you to manage multiple social media accounts under a single dashboard. You can schedule as many posts as you’d like, and even pay to promote them through the app. You can also view detailed analytics across all your social posts in a single dashboard – how convenient!
The guys over at Campaign Monitor say social scheduling “helps measure what networks, and what content works best.”
Manually posting social media posts is time-consuming, tiring, and sometimes downright annoying. Switch to scheduling, and never worry about clicking ‘tweet’ a hundred times a week again.
2. Stop using Google to build a list of influencers
All PR teams have done it. You want to get your press release covered by a specific journalist. But you have none of their contact details. So you turn to Google, and spend ages compiling any information you can find out about them. Add to a spreadsheet. Rinse and repeat.
How long does all of that take? Too long.
There are many platforms available that do all the trawling for you in milliseconds. Roxhill, for example, allows you to search for journalists across thousands of topics (no matter how weird or niche). You can also receive customisable alerts and streams, so that you can stay on top of what journalists are saying in real time. Roxhill also lets you see which journalists are leading the debate on social media, including Twitter and Instagram. Every PR person’s dream!
Heather McMaster of Infinite Global values innovative journalist databases: “Roxhill’s system for topic searching revolutionises the way in which PRs can approach the media to build relationships.”
Building your influencer list shouldn’t feel like a chore. Thanks to innovative technology, it doesn’t have to.
3. Stop compiling press clippings to track media coverage
There’s nothing more tedious than starting the day with hours of clippings, when your team could instead be attending to more urgent, high-value work. But despite being a repetitive and time-consuming task, collating daily clippings and visual analysis reports ultimately add real value across the business. Perhaps consider letting cutting-edge AI technology do all the work for you.
AI is rapidly revolutionising the PR industry. You can forget about manually gathering clippings and putting together reports. From real-time media monitoring and automated alerts, to detailed analysis and insights – AI saves you time and energy.
Daniel Batchelor, Global Head of Corporate Communications at Amadeus says: “Real-time notifications were a bit of a game-changer for us.”
Sophie Bowkett, Head of Marketing and Communications at Bird & Bird loves the efficiency of AI: “We have halved our annual expenditure on media monitoring, but expanded and improved the speed of our coverage tracking.”
In a media landscape where the news is constantly shifting and changing by the second, it’s often difficult to always be in the know. But AI powered media monitoring platforms track everything so that you don’t have to. Platforms such as Signal AI can save PR teams time and money, allowing you to focus on what really matters.
Discover how well your media monitoring adds business value.