Everything You Need to Know About PR Monitoring [+ Top 7 Tools]

You might like him or not, but you must admit one thing – Elon Musk is undoubtedly the most successful PR specialist in the world. His single tweet can shake the Bitcoin price (which happened in 2021) and boost the market value of his companies – not to mention his impact on global public opinion. That’s (okay, quite extreme, but still) an example of the public relations power. Fine, you’re not the wealthiest guy on the planet Earth. But you can enjoy the benefits of PR monitoring & tools to keep an eye on your brand, track what’s being said, and make an impact in your own way.

PR monitoring is the process of discovering your brand’s overall public perception. It covers tracking and analyzing traditional and online media, social media mentions, and other public conversations to stay informed about how your brand is viewed, identify trends, and respond to any emerging issues or opportunities.

My idea for this article is the following:

1. First, I will explain PR monitoring and present three steps for successfully monitoring your efforts
2. Second, I will present you with the top 7 PR monitoring tools. =
3. Third, you take my advices, choose the tool, and watch your PR effectiveness grow like the number of tabs open in your web browser.

Deal?

So, let’s dive right into it!

What is PR monitoring?

There are many ways to build up your PR. You can write & send press releases, organize industry events, engage in influencer marketing, and so on.

Regardless of which PR tactics you use, one element that you should definitely include is PR monitoring.

As stated in the introduction, PR monitoring is a process of tracking, analyzing, and – preferably – interpreting what people say publicly about you, your brand, company, or a product.

This process is also about assessing the efficiency of your PR tactics. In other words, it allows you to check if you do your PR well, or not.

And that’s what all our efforts are about, don’t you think?

The goal of PR monitoring is to understand your public perception and proactively manage your reputation, i.e., by spotting opportunities to grow or by identifying negative trends and reacting to them quickly.

By its very nature, PR monitoring is a continuous process. You should do it proactively and regularly.

So, reducing your PR monitoring efforts to a quarterly check-in with an attitude of “Oh, our PR is fine; let’s go back to it in three months” is a recipe for disaster!

That leads us to an essential question:

How to monitor PR?

Monitor mentions & discover sentiment

Let’s put it as simple as possible: you should start your PR monitoring process by understanding what people say about your brand and what feelings accompany these discussions.

In other words, you should discover your brand mentions and perform a sentiment analysis first.

Now, I’ll explain my point.

The Internet is enormous. Every day, people publish more than 300 million photos. Every minute, there are over 500 thousand comments posted.

It’s simply unthinkable to dig through each piece of content to find what people are saying about your brand. You need something that signals: “Okay, that post/comment/article is about me”.

That’s what brand mentions are. They help you filter out the noise and focus on the conversations that are specifically about your brand.

And here, PR monitoring tools enter the stage.

They dig through the entire web to discover who, where, how, and why they talk about your brand.

For example, Brand24 (one of the tools on the list below) allows you to monitor your brand very simply. You just need to set up the project with the keyword to be tracked.

The keyword could be literally anything – your name, brand name, hashtag, niche, etc.

Now, let’s briefly discuss the second thing – emotions.

As you surely know, our feelings are extremely powerful when it comes to making decisions. How much powerful?

According to a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, our financial decisions are based on emotions in 90%!

As PR is only a means of shaping public perception (and, broader, of convincing people to buy from you), understanding these emotions is crucial.

This is where sentiment analysis becomes essential. It helps you grasp whether the mentions of your brand carry a positive, negative, or neutral tone.

Technically, sentiment analysis uses machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to automatically detect the emotional tone behind brand mentions.

It saves a lot of time and enables much more effective analysis of your PR efforts.

Most tools identify three types of sentiment: positive, negative, and neutral.

Some – like the above-mentioned Brand24 – can recognize even more detailed feelings, such as admiration, anger, disgust, fear, joy, and sadness.

Analyze mentions

Once you have a clear picture of your brand mentions and the sentiment behind them, the next step is to analyze them more deeply to extract more valuable data.

Because, as I stated before, the whole PR monitoring process is about knowing who is talking about you, what they are saying, where they are saying it, and why it matters.

I’ll repeat it once again: monitoring your PR efforts without tools is pointless. You’d only waste your time and achieve nothing (unless you get 5 online mentions a month).

In practice, your mentions analysis should cover some aspects:

Top sources of mentions

You should identify where your most significant mentions are coming from.

Are these social media channels in general, or just TikTok? Maybe these are news outlets? Is your target audience mainly from the US? Asia? Europe?

Understanding the source of your mentions is crucial because it helps you adjust your PR efforts, i.e., by prioritizing one channel or opening to a new language.

Frequency and volume of mentions

Next, analyze the frequency and volume of your mentions.

Are there sudden spikes in activity? If so, what triggered them?

Spikes could be related to your recent marketing campaigns, assess the success of a new product launch, or signal the beginning of a crisis.

Understanding these patterns can help you assess the impact of your PR efforts and adjust them accordingly.

Consistent high volume with positive sentiment could indicate successful PR, whereas spikes in negative mentions may require immediate crisis management.

Identifying influencers

Another important thing is identifying key influencers in your niche.

Whether they are influential journalists, bloggers, industry experts, or popular social media profiles, their voices can significantly boost your reach, build credibility, and expand your audience.

And that’s the essence of PR, right?

Therefore, your analysis should focus on identifying these top voices and turning them into brand ambassadors.

But don’t stop there! Check who the top influencers of your market competitors are, as well as those who frequently criticize your brand.

Also, don’t forget to check… your haters!

Yes, identifying critics is just as important as finding supporters. 

These critics can have a strong impact on public perception, and their feedback often provides valuable insights and opportunities for improvement.

Unless they are simply “haters” with no constructive criticism to offer.

Context of mentions

Knowing the context in which your brand is mentioned is crucial.

It sheds light on your sentiment analysis by providing a deeper understanding of why people perceive your brand the way they do.

Are your positive mentions mostly linked to your new product launch? Or maybe they are the result of cooperation with a widely respected influencer?

And how about negative ones? Are they connected to your latest controversial PR campaign?

With context analysis, you can identify the drivers of sentiment, so the specific events, campaigns, or experiences that are influencing how people talk about your brand.

This knowledge is priceless for adjusting your PR strategy – whether it means continuing what works well or combating the root causes of negative feedback.

Fortunately, all the tools I listed below allow you to perform the deep-down analysis of most or all of the abovementioned points.

But before presenting them, the last step you should take in your process of PR monitoring is…

Generate report

You gathered and analyzed a lot of data. The final step is to create a clear, easy-to-understand report that combines all the information.

This report will help you assess the effectiveness of your PR efforts, share important insights with your team, and plan your next steps.

Moreover, having all the data in one place can uncover patterns and trends that might not be obvious at first glance.

Again, all the tools below offer advanced reporting features. And now, it’s time to guide you through them. 

Let’s go then!

7 Best PR monitoring tools:

01 Brand24

All right, since I used Brand24 as an example of software for measuring PR success, let’s start with this tool.

Brand24 is an AI-powered media monitoring tool that tracks, analyzes, and interprets brand mentions across multiple online sources. Namely, Brand24 monitors:

• All the most important social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitch, Telegram, Reddit, etc.;
• Non-social sources, including online news outlets, blogs, forums, and other websites;
• Video platforms and podcasts,
• Review sites and newsletters.

Yup, an impressive variety!

Besides monitoring the volume & reach of brand mentions and AI-boosted sentiment analysis (which we discussed before), Brand24 offers several other features making it probably the best PR monitoring tool available.

The Anomaly Detector is an AI-powered feature that works as your project’s guard. Simply put, it is designed to recognize any unexpected patterns in your project.

For example, if your brand suddenly experiences a significant spike in the volume of mentions, the Anomaly Detector will quickly analyze the situation.

It crawls through your project & internet and presents its interpretation in 1 or 2 short sentences.

From a PR perspective, this view allows you to check what caused your popularity to rise and what sentiment this event aroused quickly.

Here you have an example of how the Anomaly Detector described the huge spike in the volume and reach of Qatar Airways’ brand mentions.

Speaking about quick metrics, Brand24 offers two scores that allow you to assess your overall PR efforts faster than Neo avoiding Agent Smith’s bullets in the “Matrix”.

Presence Score represents the online exposure of your brand and its popularity at a given time. It indicates how effective are your PR campaigns in the case of your brand visibility.

For example, Qatar Airways experienced the most significant spike thanks to sponsoring the flight experience to popular Youtubers, The Bucket List Family.

Their video praising Qatar Airways has been watched over 100 thousand times! Great idea for a PR campaign!

Reputation Score is a metric that shows the overall sentiment and perception of your brand. In other words, it presents how favorably or unfavorably the public and media view your brand.

When it comes to Reputation Score, Qatar Airways’s most significant event in August 2024 was buying a 25% stake in a South African airline named Airlink. You can easily spot it on the chart below.

This move demonstrated Qatar Airways’ industry leadership and boosted the confidence among the company’s stakeholders. Reputation up!

I could discuss Brand24 PR monitoring features over and over, but we must move forward.

So please, let me show you only one more.

Topic Analysis is a Brand24 AI feature that groups and analyzes thousands of news articles, posts, and comments from social media channels and other mentions into thematic clusters.

It enables you to understand what triggers your audience and explore which topics get the most share of voice in your project. With that knowledge, you can allocate your PR and communication efforts.

Key features:

• Social and non-social sources monitoring
• Advanced sentiment analysis
• AI Anomaly Detector
• AI Topic Analysis
• Share of Voice
• Influencers identification & analytics
• Influencer Score
• Storm alerts & notifications
• Reputation Score
• Presence Score
• Comparison periods
• Competitor analysis
• AI Insights
• Customizable reports
• Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE)
• AI Brand Assistant

02 Prowly

Prowly is one of the most popular and comprehensive PR tools on the market.

It offers a wide range of features for PR and marketing professionals, including a press release creator, an online newsroom, a vast media database of journalists’ contact details, and more.

But what about Prowly’s PR monitoring capabilities?

While PR monitoring isn’t Prowly’s main focus, the tool can certainly be used as media monitoring software!

It can track brand mentions volume & reach, provide sentiment analysis, identify the context, and create handy reports.

Besides, Prowly has a highly customizable dashboard and includes many useful PR metrics, such as Advertisement Value Equivalency (AVE), Share of Voice (SOV), and media outlets reach.

So, if you’re looking for multi-purpose public relations software that goes beyond social media and news monitoring, you should pay attention to Prowly.

Key features:

• The volume and reach of mentions
• Sentiment Analysis
• Advertisement Value Equivalency (AVE)
• Share of Voice (SOV)
• Media outlets reach
• Press release creator
• Online newsroom
• Contacts database

03 Meltwater

Meltwater is a comprehensive PR and media intelligence platform that – like other tools on that list – tracks brand mentions, media coverage, and public sentiment.

As an all-in-one solution, Meltwater can serve for social media monitoring & management, PR analytics, and influencer analysis.

If traditional media play an important in your PR strategy, Meltwater can inform you about your presence on the printed page and suggest the most appropriate TV and radio broadcasts for you.

Besides, Meltwater enables third-party and API integrations with tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Google Analytics.

As for other PR-related features, Meltwater allows you to measure the impact of press releases, keep up to date with industry trends, monitor competitors’ activities, and more.

It’s worth noticing that Meltwater is quite expensive software. Therefore, it is dedicated to enterprises rather than small and medium-sized businesses.

Key features:

• Media monitoring & analysis
• Emotional comparison
• Social media monitoring
• Media database
• Newsletter and website newsfeed
• Press release distribution

04 Talkwalker

Talkwalker – once independent software, now part of the Hootsuite toolkit – is a consumer intelligence tool that can streamline your PR efforts.

It covers quite a significant number of sources, including social media platforms and print & broadcast monitoring.

Like other tools on the list, Talkwalker enables you to track and analyze your brand mentions, perform sentiment analysis, and monitor trends in your overall performance.

Moreover, the tool can do a crisis predictive analysis based on your monitoring results and the trend of using particular keywords (with a positive or negative attitude) regarding potential brand reputation crises.

A nice add-on is a feature called Custom Scoring.

As its name suggests, you can adjust your PR scoring system according to your needs (i.e., analyze your PR performance by international, national, and social sources).

As for disadvantages, Talkwalker’s UX is unintuitive, making learning a time-consuming process. Besides, it doesn’t offer many extras that differentiate it from other PR monitoring tools.

Key features:

• AI sentiment analysis
• Custom scoring
• Real-time alerts
• API integrations

05 BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is slightly different from other PR monitoring tools on our list. At its core, BuzzSumo focuses on content research, while monitoring PR campaigns is its secondary purpose.

But it doesn’t mean the tool can’t handle them! Let’s forget about content and focus on PR then.

So, BuzzSumo is able to monitor mentions of your brand, keep up with industry trends by recognizing and tracking topics, perform a competitive analysis, and more.

Essentially, you can analyze which content works best for your brand reputation going into such details as social media engagement and number of backlinks.

What’s more, BuzzSumo allows you to set alerts for new content published by influencers, journalists, and outlets. Why is it important?

Because in PR, relationships are everything! By tracking top authors, you can quickly engage with their posts & articles and thus – increase your chances of cooperating with them.

Key features:

• Brand mentions and topics monitoring
• Influencers, journalists, and outlets analysis
• Trends recognition
• New content alerts

06 Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics is a great example of how social media monitoring tools can boost their features with the power of AI.

At its core, the tool includes quite typical social listening solutions that are useful for PR monitoring: mentions tracking, sentiment analysis, trend identification, competitor monitoring, advanced reporting, and so on.

The undisputed strength of Mentionlytics is its AI-powered features toolkit, which includes Mention Clustering (to group mentions by topics), AI Mention Translate (to better understand the context of foreign mentions), and – most notably – the Social Intelligent Advisor (SIA).

In short, this AI feature analyzes your project and shares specific recommendations based on brand mentions and their sentiment.

For example, SIA can identify your hashtag performance in social media posts, detect trolls, and give you handy tips about your competitors.

Key features:

• AI features toolkit
• Social Intelligent Advisor (SIA)
• Review monitoring
• Geoanalysis & audience demographics

07 Brandwatch

Brandwatch is a Cision-owned consumer intelligence platform designed for social media management, influencer marketing, content marketing, and media relations.

As for the PR monitoring, Brandwatch can – above all – track & analyze brand mentions, manage marketing and PR campaigns, benchmark with competitors, as well as identify and mitigate potential reputation crises.

Let’s stop here for a while.

Brandwatch’s crisis management is really impressive. The tool can detect unusual activity that has the potential to escalate and send impressively detailed real-time signals.

Moreover, its well-designed and varied charts can help you spot emerging crises more effectively.

As for social media monitoring, Brandwatch offers social listening features, cross-channel social inbox, and some really nice integrations.

When it comes to pricing, Brandwatch’s plans are quite expensive. Therefore, the tool is dedicated mostly to enterprise-sized businesses.

Key features:

• Real-time crisis signals & alerts
• Social listening
• Social media integrations
• Influencer marketing management

Conclusion

As I (hopefully!) proved to you, PR monitoring is essential to any successful public relations strategy.

By keeping an eye on what people are saying about your brand and understanding the emotions behind brand mentions, you can be more effective in managing your reputation.

The whole PR monitoring process requires attention to detail but definitely isn’t rocket science. All you have to do is to follow good practices and use the right tools to streamline your efforts.

Because the right PR monitoring tools – like the ones we’ve discussed in this article – make the process much more efficient by providing insights into sentiment, context, influencers, and so on.

So, choose the tool that best suits your needs, dive into the ocean of data, and watch your PR efforts grow stronger over time!

Final thoughts:

• Emotions drive people, so your role as a PR professional is to detect and understand these feelings.
• A data-driven approach is essential for tailoring your PR strategy to better connect with your audience.
• Effective PR monitoring helps you stay ahead of potential crises and identify emerging trends fast.
• Top PR monitoring tools are constantly developing their features, including AI-powered ones.

It’s time to choose the best PR monitoring tool! How about Brand24 and its 14-day free trial? Strongly recommended!