PR is Changing: Online Press Clippings & How to Adapt

One of the vital ingredients in determining your brand’s health is to keep track of breaking news about your company, competitors and the industry you operate in.

Staying on top of your brand’s mentions in the press can help you design your PR campaigns for maximum impact and develop stronger media relations, as well as raise awareness of potential crises or rumours being spread about your brand.

Evaluating your brand performance in the media is one of the most important applications of our platform.

PR and marketing professionals can easily track which news sites their stories are reaching and can engage with media influencers, as Brandwatch includes over 4 million of the most important news sites available.

Below are few tips to capture the news that impacts your business.

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Search for Topical Keyword News Mentions

 

At Brandwatch, we don’t just monitor the social web. We listen to all online activity, including news sites.

We crawl over 70 million sources to monitor what people say about your brand, products, competitors, industry or any related topics, as it happens.

Every 30 seconds, we crawl every major news page that isn’t behind a paywall, along with many smaller, local news sites (typically reviewed 3 times a day). Below are just a few of the major news sites we cover on an almost-instant basis.

By setting up topical Boolean searches, you will spend less time culling through irrelevant articles to find the breaking news that drives your business. You can even monitor a hand-selected list of publications (think of target publications or industry niches) and news sites on a Query level or by creating site lists.

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Filter and Segment News Articles

 

Once you’ve pinpointed the editorial content of media sources that are relevant to your business, you can filter your articles based on the vast range of metadata we attribute to each site in your dataset.

All mentions from news sources can be chopped and sliced by A great way to identify influential news articles is by using the Impact Score. This score shows you the potential impact of an author, site or mention and is based on two things: how much potential a mention has to be seen and how often it has been viewed, shared or retweeted, as well as accounting for MozRank when relevant.

Additional ranking filters, including MozRank and backlink values, ensure that only the most relevant mentions make it into the final cut.

The MozRank score is a measure of the site’s credibility, hence how influential it is.

The score is calculated on a logarithmic scale between 0 and 10, depending on the backlinks and linking websites’ quality. It is by far the most widely-liked SEO benchmarking tool but can be confusing to dissect.

You can click on the MozRank numbers in Brandwatch to get more details.

Alternatively, you can also sort your news sources by backlinks, the number of web pages that link to that site, which is another important influence metric.

By default, the news sites component shows the top 10 sites, but you can change this by clicking on the controls button and filter the number to the amount of sites you’d like to retrieve.

In addition to blacklisting problem sites, we have several measures in place to prevent spam from appearing in your datasets, including multiple layers of smart pattern-matching algorithms and keyword-density checks to detect SEO text.

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Share and Archive News Articles

 

Once you’ve analysed the top sites mentioning your brand, you might want to archive specific articles or share them with anyone in your team.

Our workflow facilities make it easier to cycle through news articles and ensure each gets the attention it requires.

Found an interesting article? Assign it to the relevant member of staff so they can handle it, add notes if needed and check it off when resolved. Additionally, you could run specific analyses on archived tags.

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Receive Email Alerts

 

Perhaps you’d want an update if a campaign is doing well, if your competitor is being mentioned, or if a key journalist has been chattering away about one of your products.

Using Brandwatch, you can take a proactive approach to online media monitoring with Alerts, pinging an email straight to your (or other people’s) inbox.

If you haven’t seen how you can use Brandwatch Alerts for brand management, you can find more detailed info here.

Tracking news articles is just one tiny facet of the cool things you can do with Brandwatch.

If you’d like to know more about how comprehensive our coverage is and how we crawl our sites, please see our support page or – if you’re not already a client – get in touch with us to find out more.