PR Clipping – How to Do Clipping Using Brand24?

PR clipping is an essential method for public relations, or marketing teams as well as agencies as it helps to evaluate their work, measure their efforts, and check the effectiveness of campaigns. PR clippings (also called Press clippings) help to stay up to date with the company’s online presence and reputation.

Measuring your efforts and effectiveness while working in a PR or marketing team may be difficult sometimes, but one of the best methods that help teams deliver results to their supervisors is PR clipping. This multi-purpose method is the evaluation of your work or certain campaigns.

In this article, I will do my best to explain what PR clipping is, why is it beneficial and how can you do it in the best way possible, to save your time and resources.

Here is an agenda if you want to jump into any specific topic right away, or you are interested in what we are going to have a closer look at.

• What is PR clipping?
• PR clipping purposes and benefits
• PR clipping services
• How does media monitoring help with PR clipping?
• How to: PR clipping
• PR clipping reports
• Brand24 and PR clipping: Summary

Want to learn more? Let’s get started!

What is PR clipping?

Let’s start with an explanation of what exactly PR clipping means. I will guide you through a definition of PR clipping, its purposes and then, you will learn how to prepare such clipping.

Definition of PR Clipping

PR clipping (also called Press clipping) is one of the methods that help businesses or agencies measure how many times a certain company has been mentioned in either print, online, or broadcast media. In this article, I will focus on online media such as online editions of newspapers, social media, news sites, newsletters, blogs, or articles. 

PR clipping is an evaluation of a company’s online and offline presence.

PR clipping can be presented in the form of a report that includes all of the results, collected materials, and online publications. 

PR clipping is also called Press Clipping.

PR clipping purposes and benefits

PR clippings and press clippings have a lot of purposes and pros that make this method very valuable and useful. 

• Helps to measure the effectiveness of PR or marketing efforts
• Helps stay up to date with all mentions of a company
• Helps agencies evaluate, summarise and report their work
• Helps to improve public relations 
• Helps to check the brand reputation of a company
• Helps to check the effectiveness of certain campaigns 
• Helps to measure brand awareness

As you can notice, PR clipping can be beneficial not only for agencies that need to prove their value to clients but also for businesses that need to control their reputation, brand awareness, or measure their PR or marketing efforts.

PR clipping services

There are PR clipping services that can help collect mentions of a company and create reports. Some of them can additionally analyze metrics that can be valuable supplements to the clippings. 

One of the services that perform exquisitely when it comes to PR or press clippings are media monitoring services. Media monitoring is a method that makes collecting online mentions easier and less time-consuming.

There are many media monitoring services that you can choose from. Your decision will surely depend on your resources, since these tools vary not only when it comes to their features, but also their price.

1. Google Alerts is a free alternative to media monitoring services. It can be helpful for PR Clipping but obviously, it does not offer many possibilities. If you don’t have any resources to spend on a PR clipping service, you may go with Google Alerts at first.
2. Brand24 is one of the best media monitoring services that give you a high value for a reasonable price. This service will make PR clipping a lot easier and more time-effective.
3. Talkwalker is another media monitoring service that will work great for PR clipping, but it is much more expensive. If you have a big budget to spend on clippings, you surely can choose it over cheaper alternatives.

How does media monitoring help with PR clipping?

Brand24 is one of the media monitoring services that allow you to automatically gather online media mentions of your company or brands that your agency works for. 

Media monitoring is all about staying up to date with everything that is being said or written online about a certain brand name, topic, industry, or whatever that may be useful or interesting for you. This method and media monitoring services allow you to monitor keywords or hashtags and automatically find all the mentions of them from all over the Web.

Brand24, for example, tracks multiple sources that are valuable both for public relations and marketing teams as well as agencies.

Why? Because it covers media such as newspapers, news sites, blogs, newsletters, podcasts, forums, Medium, Quora, and social media, including Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, TikTok, Telegram and Facebook.

How to: PR clipping

PR clipping (also called Press clipping) done manually, especially online where mentions of companies are many, would be almost impossible. The process would be very time-consuming and inaccurate.

It gets definitely easier if you decide to conduct a PR clipping with a dedicated clipping service, which monitors automatically all of the web content and finds mentions of a specific company, industry, or campaign for you.

Here are three steps to do PR clipping:

• Find a media monitoring service that you want to use. Start a free trial if it offers one. You can start using Brand24 for free for example.

• Set your first monitoring project. Enter keywords that you want to monitor. They can be associated with your company name, your competitors, your industry, a specific product that you offer, or a campaign that you run. You can also enter hashtags if you want to track any specific ones.

• From now on, the tool will automatically collect all the mentions of the keywords of your choice. All you need to do is go through them from time to time and browse the results. Voila!

Brand24 monitors multiple online sources and media types, it browses through all the public sources available on the internet, to find all the mentions for you.

Brand24 covers social media, including Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Facebook, and traditional media such as web pages, news sites, newsletters, blogs, forums, and podcasts.

It works very effectively as a PR clipping service because it gathers automatically all the mentions in one dashboard.

Two really cool features that also come in handy while creating a PR clipping is the Importance filter that puts the results in order taking their importance into consideration.

Another one is an Influence Score that measures how influential is a specific author or website. In the Analysis tab, you will be able to see which influential public profiles are mentioning your brand.

There is also an online Presence Score that Brand24 automatically measures. It is a metric that is potentially very useful for public relations and marketing teams that need to check and compare the level of each brand’s online presence and compare it to its competitors.

PR clipping reports

Brand24 is not only a media monitoring service, but also offers analytical and reporting features. You can use such a tool not only to automatically gather all the mentions that prove your PR or marketing efforts but also to create dedicated PR clipping reports, ready to deliver to your boss or client.

PDF Reports

Brand24 gives you the possibility to generate and export the most important monitoring data into PDF reports, Excel reports, or Infographics. This service makes PR clipping easier, as it helps you create personalized reports, that include the most important metrics and mentions of a brand.

Excel Reports

Email Reports

Brand24 also can send you email reports that will notify you daily or weekly about changes in the dashboard. These emails save a lot of time as they deliver the newest mentions of a company directly into your inbox. This feature really makes a difference for PR clipping.

Brand24 and PR clipping: Summary

PR clipping (also called Press clipping) is an essential part of public relations. A media monitoring tool will help you measure and report your PR efforts.

The Brand24 tool ensures:

• Monitoring keywords, hashtags and collecting mentions in real-time.
• Automated, but personalized PR clipping Reports (PDF, Excel, or email reports).
• Importance filter, that helps you discover the most important mentions in the beginning.
• Storm alters, that notify you about the important changes in the dashboard.
• Mobile App (push notifications) and email reports notify you about the results. You don’t need to check the dashboard often.
• Media monitoring services make PR clipping a lot more time-effective.
• Presence Score helps to measure a brand’s online performance and brand awareness.
• Influence Score helps to measure the influence of authors or sources mentioning a brand.

Ready to start measuring your PR efforts? Try the Brand24 tool for free!

Read more about PR evaluation.

FAQ

Q: What is an example of a press clipping?

A: A press clipping is an excerpt or a copy of an article, feature, or mention of a company, individual, or product that appears in a media outlet such as a newspaper, magazine, or online publication. An example of a press clipping could be an article in a local newspaper highlighting the success of a small business or a feature story about a new product launch in a popular industry magazine.

Q: How do you calculate press clippings?

A: To calculate press clippings, you can use a PR clipping tool like Brand24 or engage press clipping services. These tools and services monitor various media outlets, track mentions of your company or brand, and compile them in a report or dashboard. The number of press clippings collected over a given period can serve as a measure of your public relations and media outreach efforts.

Q: How do you make a media clipping?

A: To create a media clipping from social media platforms or media outlets, follow these steps:

1. Identify the source: Locate the article, post, or mention on the media outlet or social media platform where your brand, company, or product is featured.
2. Capture the content: Take a screenshot or save a digital copy of the specific content or mention. For print publications, you can scan or photocopy the relevant page.
3. Organize and store: Create a digital or physical folder to store and organize your media clippings for easy access and reference.
4. Analyze and report: Periodically review your media clippings to assess the effectiveness of your PR and marketing efforts, track sentiment, and gain insights into your brand’s public perception.

Remember to adhere to copyright laws and seek permission from the original publisher or content creator when necessary.