Public Relations Campaigns Should Use Social Listening

A public relations agency is responsible for a tremendous amount, from competitor analysis and tracking ROI to media relations, while keeping their clients happy. A PR Agency needs a social listening tool to keep track of all these responsibilities. This tool allows the PR Firm to monitor its clients’ industries to forecast product trends or brand reputation along with other relevant topics.

Social Listening Means Less Time Monitoring

PR executives tend to be always on the move. There’s no time to stay glued to a computer when there are meetings and on-site visits to client locations to attend. Listening tools deliver alerts to the listeners wherever they want them, at the office or on their smartphone. There is no longer a need to manually check social media or niche publications to stay up to date. Media monitoring tools search online and browse social media platforms, providing real-time alerts on whatever topics are chosen. PR Executives can learn about their clients, their competitors (the PR Agency’s competitors as well as their clients’ competitors), and the industry with only a few clicks. Instead of getting this information after hours of research, it can be gathered in a few seconds. Saving time is especially important to smaller agencies with limited staffing and manpower.

Offer Value

Companies hire PR agencies to come up with ideas. Having new ideas means knowing about all the latest trends. Imagine if an agency caught the re-emergence of an old trend or a new software that becomes the next Slack. Monitoring industry keywords, important publications, and newer, progressive companies will keep a PR firm updated on new innovations. Within the last five years there’s been a huge shift in the trend of watching social media. Offering online and social media expertise is a must. If a PR Agency isn’t monitoring for their clients, another agency certainly will.

Measure Brand Impact

Staying on top of brand coverage is certainly going to make a client happy, but social listening tools can go further by measuring the impact of your efforts.

Social Listening Tools Generate Reports to Track:

• Success of press releases
• Success of social media platforms
• Success of a client’s blog
• Success of ad campaigns, videos, and forms of advertising
• Which track is getting the most coverage, and where
• Customer sentiment or tone

Tools with sentiment analysis, like Mention, monitor how customers react after a PR event or regarding a particular product. Clients may be advertising the wrong features or capabilities of their products. Or there may be new use cases for their product discovered.

Monitoring Competitors

Know the client’s major competitors by using the listening tool to create reports indicating:

• Which competitors are performing best on Twitter, Facebook, etc.
• Which competitor has the most positive mentions
• The kind of product feedback they receive from their customers
• Competitor company or product communications

Start Listening Now

Employing social listening gives a PR agency an advantage for both serving current clients and finding new prospects. In order for a social listening tool to improve the business, it needs to provide insight for a number of clients from multiple channels in both real-time and historically through reports.

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