Track: Monitoring Brand Mentions and Impressions

One of the main reasons why you need to set up a Public Relations Department is to have a team that will develop a plan on the specific part of the year when your business should be on the most discussed topics among your audiences.

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When you have that plan, you always know when your business hits the headlines. The main concern- basically the toughest to answer- is on how people will talk about your business.

Here are the tools that you may use so you know who are talking about your business, and what they are saying about it:

1.    Search on Major Search Sites 

Open an incognito window and visit Google, Yahoo and Bing search sites. Key in the company name and other branded words that you use during your campaign. 

Study the results of the first three pages. You will see all the websites that talk about your business and offerings.

In documenting for a formal research, have spearate pages for positive, neutral, and negative posts from the search results. You may go thoroughly until the fifth page if you have time.

2.    Search on Social Media Sites 

Open social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. Use the search functions of these sites keying in your company name and branded words. Get the top results.

Why do we keep on limiting you to only top page results? These are the most fresh and prominent web pages that are talking about your business and offerings.

If you have a designated hashtag, you may use it in the search bar for a faster search.

Moreover, keep on checking your social media accounts because journalists and bloggers may have tagged you their posts on stories that may be related to your business.

3.  Access Major Publications Online and Offline

Manual checking of newspapers and magazines may be tough and expensive. In doing this, you need to subscribe to every major publications.

What if you are running out of resources? Whenever a journalist has communicated with you for a story, request if you could be notified about the publication of the story.

Another trick is to talk to the seller at the newsstand to inform you immediately if he sees your busines in any of the newspapers or magazines he is selling.

Since most publications nowadays are also on the Internet, you may access their website and digital versions so you do not need to secure a hardcopy of their editions.

4.    Google Alerts

Use Google Alerts and other web-based services that will notify you once a new web page mentioning your business and other branded keywords is spotted or indexed.

Google Alerts track blog, social media accounts, news sites, corporate websites, dating sites and all types of websites for you. It literally sends you an alert email once a mention has been detected.

Talking to journalists is always the best option. However understand that they are just doing a personal favor, so you must know how to reward their efforts in return. 

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