Over the past 10 years, the importance of tracking conversations across the media has grown rapidly. This is mainly due to the explosion of the internet, specifically social media. Having the ability to identify what’s being said about your brand is now critical, so critical that the thought of missing a media mention keeps marketing and public relation professionals up at night. During this article, we’ll cover the importance of media and social media listening tools in helping you monitor critical media mentions, but before we jump in, let’s first define what a media mention is.
What is a media mention?
A media mention is a reference to a keyword across all types of media. A media mention can take many forms, for example, it can be your brand name, your competitor's brand name, an industry trend or a new product you’ve just launched. Media mentions can be both positive and negative, depending on the context of the wider conversation.
What is media monitoring?
Media monitoring is the action of finding and analysing mentions containing the keyword/s you’re looking for across media types. Professionals use media monitoring tools to assist them with tracking mentions about their brand target market, competition, brand, industry etc. in real time.
How do you track media mentions?
There are a few ways you can track media mentions including:
- Google alerts
- Searching media manually
- Using a media monitoring tool to search for content
Different brands have different needs, and when budget is a constraint, some businesses naturally turn to options one and two since they’re free. However, like many free things, while there may not be a monetary cost, you do pay the price elsewhere. Free ways of tracking media mentions usually lack the breadth and depth of sources needed to have full visibility; and when you’re only able to see a small part of the wider picture, you lack confidence in the data too.
Missing a media mention might not sound like a big deal, but that mention could be critical to your business. Critical media mentions alter the business landscape – and not just temporarily - today’s top stories power the professional world long after the headlines hit. This is why full visibility of media mentions is so important. When executives are aware of critical media mentions, more often than not they spark a reaction and drive strategic decisions.
Why is it important to have full visibility of media mentions?
In a world where brand reputation can be made or slain at the tap of a tweet, concerns about visibility blind spots are valid. In addition to brand reputation management, monitoring media mentions help companies:
- Connect with their audience
- React to issues as they’re happening
- Optimise campaigns and amplify their message
- Fuel content marketing
- Anticipate crisis
- Fine tune product development
- Manage supply chain risks
- Gauge perception
- Measure brand visibility
How to ensure you never miss a media mention
If lack of media visibility stressing you out, we're here to help ensure you never miss a media mention. With Meltwater, you can see nearer and farther since we offer the most comprehensive content network globally across news, social media, print, and broadcast media. We’re committed to investing in a wide breadth of content, from national, regional, suburbia to global, multilingual, trade and niche. Our AI-powered crawlers set the industry standards, adding millions of new articles and mentions every day, expanding our current database of 1.3 trillion documents.
While our source base is extensive, that doesn’t mean you have to waste time sifting through unwanted material; we make it easy by sending you only what’s relevant and filtering out the noise. Here’s how we ensure you never miss a media mention.
Twitter firehose
Our long-term strategic partnership with Twitter gives us unmatched access to the platform’s data. As part of the premier partnership, our clients can gain access to their “full firehose” – the company’s deepest, real-time data stream which includes 100% of all available tweets. As a full enterprise partner of Twitter, we capture approximation 350 million tweets daily and enable analysis to be built on top of the most complete data sets possible.
With over half a billion visits a month, Reddit is one of the most visited websites globally. But despite its enormous popularity, Reddit has largely escaped the attention of businesses. This is mainly due to difficulty in tracking and analyzing the network. However, thanks to our partnership with Reddit, customers can now track the network's conversations in our user-friendly analytics platform, alongside data from Twitter, Facebook, discussion forums, blogs, and other sources. Use unmatched Reddit data, combined with Meltwater industry-leading analytics, and you have a research source to understand how topics are discussed online and spot rising trends to enable more strategic and effective campaign decisions.
Print clippings
While the debate around whether ‘print is dying’ continues, right now, it’s clear that print isn’t dead. And if PRs are to be diligent with capturing every mention, they should consider monitoring print as a channel too. At Meltwater, we pride ourselves on being a one-stop-shop for all your media monitoring needs, that’s why we also offer printed media clippings and analytics through our trusted global, and local print monitoring partners.
Podcasts
Listen up! Interest in podcasts is growing rapidly, with 32% of Americans now listening to podcasts monthly (up from 26% last year) - your media mentions monitoring strategy should reflect this industry development. To help you understand and analyze this growing industry, our new podcast monitoring capabilities allow customers to stay on top of over 25,000 podcasts globally, we’re also adding over 3,000 new podcasts to the platform every day, in over a dozen languages.
Looking for a media partner, why choose Meltwater?
Meltwater continues to invest in delivering a wide breadth of content to more than 30,000 brands worldwide. We're doing this by growing the World’s largest news and social media database. Our industry-leading AI-powered crawlers, and a network of global partnerships with content providers such as Twitter, Reddit and Dow Jones, help us capture more content than anyone else. More content means more reliable analytics that help you find the insights you need. We utilize artificial intelligence to discover content from all corners of the internet. With the most comprehensive network of content partnerships globally, Meltwater allows customers to get full-text access to premium content not freely available online, including print and broadcast content, from a library of over 1.3 trillion documents. What's more, we add over 500 million new documents every day! While this all sounds very tiring, from a client perspective, it's a smooth ride!
We understand that the modern user expects simple and elegant consumer applications. That’s why our solution prioritizes simplicity and efficiency with a sleek new intuitive navigation and design that has streamlined user experience at the core. Fill out the form to learn how you can benefit from consistent data and full media visibility.
