The headline is misleading—we don’t think it’s an either/or, but a both/and situation. Media monitoring excels at uncovering mentions in traditional, broadcast, and online media. Many providers also offer social media subscriptions on their platform (like us). But if you want greater insight into the social conversations that matter to you while working in a platform designed specifically for social media workflow and analysis, then you’ll want to consider adding social listening to your strategy.
Keep reading to learn how you can benefit from each service and when you might use one over the other—and why combining both solutions is the ultimate way to see the full picture.
What is media monitoring?
As the media landscape continues to evolve, you’ve probably realized that relying on outdated tactics, like depending exclusively on organic reach, is no longer enough. PR pros of 2022 and beyond need tools that will allow them to effectively evaluate the impact of their strategies, tailor their approach, and continuously improve their results. Media monitoring is such a tool.
Intuitive media monitoring solutions allow you to quickly and easily navigate the world of media content, gain the insights necessary to inform your campaigns, and prove the value of your PR efforts.
Media monitoring advantages
Media monitoring is all about finding out what’s being said about your brand in more traditional news outlets, such as print, TV, radio, podcasts, and online news. The idea is that if someone mentions your brand in any form of traditional media (even if it’s just a quote in an article), then you should know about it ASAP so that you can respond accordingly. Media monitoring ensures that no mention gets left out, so that when it comes to telling your brand’s or clients’ stories you can take every opportunity to speak up. Sometimes those stories aren’t always told correctly, so as a PR pro you need to be prepared to offer adjustments, improve accuracy, or provide a response (depending on the situation).
Crisis communications
If set up correctly, media monitoring can serve as an early warning system for issues and crises. Proactively responding to a crisis can help alleviate some of the stress and haste associated with crisis comms and even allow you to get ahead of the media story. Plus, media monitoring will allow you to gauge the success of your crisis response and stay up to date as events unfold. After all, a crisis is an opportunity for your company to prove to loyal customers that you have their best interests in mind and are dedicated to staying on top of any past, present, or future issues.
Messaging
Use media monitoring to track information about the messages that your organization has released to see how compelling, shareable, and on-brand your media strategy is. This can be applied to historical data, or current information about campaigns to shape your future communications strategies.
Evaluation
Media monitoring allows you to evaluate how your PR and marketing campaigns have performed, especially in comparison to your competition. In any organization, data is important for development, offering metrics to support future training, changes, and planning.
What media monitoring does best
Media monitoring allows you to listen far and wide. Results will often include a broad range of coverage of online, print, broadcast, and podcasts. By using media monitoring, you ensure that all vital content sources are tracked, and that you are consistently staying up to date. Monitoring usually includes setting up email alerts that provide you with news about your brand, industry, and competition, ensuring that you are on top of the most important coverage.
Media monitoring uncovers brand mentions and identifies key influencers in traditional media and online news, blogs, forums, and review sites. This can also guide you in identifying which media outlets cover your brand, industry, competitors, or relevant topics.
This ultimately will allow you to understand how your brand is being discussed by the media, and how you measure up to competition.
What is social listening
Social listening is the act of monitoring and analyzing conversations occurring on social media about a company or brand. Discovering what your customers are saying about you can help inform your business strategy, customer service approach, and many other aspects of your business.
Make sure to monitor your brand on social media so that you can capture the conversations that matter. It is important for you to be able to easily identify the social media influencers and posts most likely to impact your company—whether positively or negatively—so you can take any necessary action.
Social listening advantages
Social media is one of the best channels for brands to connect with their audience. Social listening is the first step towards empowering these connections, helping brands find conversations they can become a part of.
Social listening is an important part of any PR strategy because it’s a way to gauge the overall sentiment of your brand, product, or service. It also helps you see what people are saying about your competitors so that you can stay on top of trends in your industry.
What social listening does best
Social listening discovers results from billions of online conversations related to your brand on major social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Reddit and TikTok. This can offer direction to your PR and marketing team(s) to find out what’s working (and what isn’t) with your campaigns.
It is a common struggle to display the value of social media to business experts who don’t always understand the significance that communications efforts have. Quantifying your success with data in executive-ready reports will back up your PR achievements.
Why social listening matters
Social listening should be seen as a supplement to traditional media monitoring, not a replacement—and vice versa. When you’re trying to get a feel for what people are talking about across the web, you want to know what people are saying about you specifically. Not just the industry or your competition, but you. You want to know what people are saying in specific terms—how they refer to your company or brand name, where they mention it in relation to other topics, and how often they mention it.
Social listening lets you do this by giving you access to keyword-based searches that allow you to focus on specific search terms or phrases. By conducting these searches regularly over time and across multiple channels, you can get an idea of what people are saying and how their opinions, feelings, or values have changed over time.
It can help you identify potential problems before they happen, and it can help you build relationships with customers by showing them that you’re listening and caring about their concerns.
Using media monitoring and social listening together
While you can look at trees one by one at the ground level, you need a helicopter to scan the whole forest.
To ensure your team is set up for success, you can create alerts across a social media platform that will keep you aware of instances where your brand is being talked about (either directly or indirectly). Include your brand’s handle and broader mentions. Also, account for common misspellings, nicknames, flagship products, and industry-adjacent terms.
By receiving these alerts, your PR team will be better able to block and tackle on your brand’s behalf, on traditional and social media. Setting a story straight, preparing a new campaign, answering FAQs, routing messages to different departments—we’re sure you’re starting to see that there are many useful possibilities.
Which solution is right for you
An all-in-one intuitive PR platform, with many features that complement each other, is one of the most important digital tools in any communicator’s toolbox. But, maybe you’re just starting out, on a budget, or unsure if you really need everything our intuitive easy-to-use PR hub offers…
If you’re looking for: A way to keep track of what people are saying about your brand, product, or service on social media, then social listening is the right solution for you. It will give you insight into users’ opinions and feelings about your brand in real time. This data can be incredibly useful when it comes to figuring out what your customers value, and the kind of content will resonate with them most (and make them more likely to buy from you).
If you’re looking for: A way to listen to what people are saying about your brand, industry, and competitors, and measure the success of your media relations efforts, then media monitoring is probably the right solution. Social media is a free for all conversation—anyone can talk about anything—but traditional media is still an authoritative and credible medium that requires work on your part to get coverage in.
But if you’re looking for a holistic view of your coverage, messaging, and audience, you’ll want to…
Leverage both tools for the ultimate solution. Together, media monitoring and social listening give you access to the most comprehensive set of data available—and you can access it all from one platform.
Want to learn more about Agility’s integrated social listening and media monitoring services? Book a demo today!
