Importance of Media Monitoring in Public Relations and Social Media

Media monitoring is one of the most essential part of Public Relations and Social Media. Monitoring the media helps you understand what the impact of your company has on your customers and the public. Monitoring media can help analyse all aspects of your company’s media image, and can help you obtain headlines and stay on top of the news in your industry. You can discover what works, what isn’t working, and exactly what your customers are saying. Many companies ignore media monitoring until something negative occurs or the reputation starts to get out of control in a negative way.

In Social Media, the landscape has undergone a huge transformation in the last couple of years. Brands have gradually increased awareness regarding the importance of monitoring what their target audience says about them in the online environment. From a PR perspective, social media has always been perceived as an amazing tool of free publicity that allows direct communication with the target audiences without any external filters such as media.

Due to the fact that PR practitioners often face the challenge of dealing with positive as well as negative publicity, monitoring social media is essential and therefore below are the reasons why tracking your online activities are necessary .

1. Social media monitoring can be used to avoid issues management that might, sooner or later, turn into a crisis.

2. While planning a PR campaign, Social Media helps us to understand the market needs and demand.

3. Social media monitoring is a great way of turning complaints and negative feedback into positive publicity.

Is Media Tracking Necessary?                               

Media tracking is a process where you check not only what media has covered about your organization but also check what media is talking about your competitors. The importance here lies about what kind of messages are being read by the readers. The process of media tracking can be of three types:

1. Print

2. Broadcast

3. Internet

A hundred years ago, all news media was written media, so media monitoring services were clipping services that physically cut information out of newspapers and magazine and then mailed them to their clients. These days, a media monitoring service may specialize in print media, broadcast, the internet, or all three.

Media Monitoring tools and its benefit:

In the digital age, you no longer have to wait for tomorrow’s newspaper to find out what is happening in the world. In fact, you can even receive updates in real time. This has caused a dramatic change for the role of a PR professional. It is no longer sufficient to evaluate the success and reach of your PR campaign with press clippings and Ad Value. PR teams need to show solid, measurable proof of their efforts and with current monitoring tools and applications.

Here are just a few reasons why monitoring tools are beneficial to PR teams and why you should be using them:

1. These tools can monitor online 24/7 when PR professionals can’t and this can help PR agencies stay one step ahead of their competition.

2. Monitoring tools provide a detailed analysis of campaign reach as well as buyer behavior, giving PR teams the ability to present their results in a meaningful way

3. Monitoring tools may not help PR professionals entirely avoid a crisis, they certainly help manage them and can act as an early warning system to issues that may lie ahead.

4. The media landscape is extremely fast paced and PR pros need to keep up with the latest trends. Using monitoring tools can not only help PR agencies analyze what trends are prominent, but they can assess the importance of brand mentions across different platforms, identifying both potential issues and opportunities.