PR's Only True Measure

If you've ever wondered on how to measure your performance as a PR professional, look no further. The only true way to measure the success of your campaign is by tracking its engagement rate. This article will break down for you what that means and include some great resources for tracking your campaign's reach, growth, and engagement rates. Don't worry — this isn't going to be dry or boring! Instead, it's going to cover a variety of interesting angles on measuring success so that you can find out just how effective your message has been across all platforms.

Want to learn more? Check out the full article here: 

https://www.prweek.com/article/1273666/prs-true-measure

What is your favorite source for social media data?

That really depends on who I'm communicating with. If the person I'm trying to reach has a personal Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. account and their information is public – that's always my first stop. Then I'd use Spredfast and Meltwater to see if they're getting involved across multiple channels, or just talking about it here and there (hopefully not just here).

Jai Reddy, Social Media Manager at MediaCom USA

Twitter's new algorithm shows how all tweets are relevant when released in a timely fashion to the audience of your choosing. The algorithm basically shows the parts of your tweet that are retweeted.

Are you sure that this is not an ad?

This is not an advertisement. But it is a post from a client, so they get credit for writing it.

Another way to measure Twitter engagement is by using TweetReach to see what metrics are most important. TweetReach has several different metrics you can use to find out how well you're doing on Twitter. Check out this example: https://www.komarkermedia.com/blog/twitter-engagement-a-big-list-of-statistics/

Social Media Monitoring Tools

Where do you see the future of Digital PR going?

I’m really interested in how companies (and PR pros) use data from social media to learn more about their consumers, and influence them in a positive way. I think we’re just getting started here – for instance, we’re already seeing some creative uses of Twitter sentiment data, especially for brands that engage in customer service through social media. I also think that tools to track the spread of news and information are going to be very useful for PR pros in the coming years. We’re already seeing this in some instances, and I think that it will only become more mainstream.

Paul Budnitz, Founder and CEO at Ello

Social media is driving the consumer world. It's also changing the way people communicate with businesses. The ways that organizations interact with their audiences on social media platforms lead to creative ways of creating brand awareness, engaging customers into loyalty programs, and fostering advocacy for their brands. Social media is now a core part of the consumer decision making process when it comes to choosing brands, companies and other types of services.

Here is a list of social media monitoring tools that can help you track and analyze your brand's social conversations:

https://www.prweek.com/article/1273666/prs-true-measure

What are PR metrics, types, and goals?

PR Metrics refers to how good you are at getting your brand or organization's name out there. If an event you're planning has a lot of interest from the media, then "PR metrics" means that more people will be searching the web for information about it. PR metrics measure a campaign's success by looking at things like Google search engine rankings, social media traffic, and quality leads from media outreach.

There are 3 main PR metrics:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - Keywords that your organization wants to appear in search engines when a potential customer searches for something. For instance, if you have a new product that has never been made available to the public, then your goal might be to have people searching for "new lemonade stand ideas."

2. Social Media Monitoring – The amount of time and effort you spend on paying attention to the conversations in social media. This is probably the most important metric because it measures how well you're managing your brand's reputation online.

3. Media Outreach – The number of people you are able to reach through traditional media outlets such as newspapers, magazines, and radio. Press releases and media interviews can all have positive and negative effects on your PR efforts.

Quick tip: if you want to measure the "buzz" about something online, Google Alerts is your best bet. Choose topics that are relevant to your organization or a brand campaign that you’re planning on launching and Google will email you when there is a relevant mention somewhere on the internet. This way you can be proactive about learning what people are saying about what is important to your business before it affects your brand's reputation.

Want to learn more? Check out the full article here: 

https://www.prweek.com/article/1273666/prs-true-measure

What metrics does your company use for Social Media?

We may not be able to share all of them, but some of our social media metrics include:

@mentions & Retweets on Twitter, Facebook likes, shares and comments, Klout scores, traffic to our blog and social media sites (such as StumbleUpon and Reddit), engagement rates across various social networks. If a community manager is involved with a campaign, we might be tracking things like pageviews on Facebook groups that they manage or unique monthly visitors to that group.

Our metrics can also be broken down based upon the types of audiences that engage with our content. For instance, sometimes we'll break down metrics by:

- total number of people who engaged in the campaign (includes all followers, not just our fans)

- unique Twitter followers gained during the campaign

- unique Facebook fans gained during the campaign

- average retweets per tweet (for Twitter)

- average pageviews per article (for our blog)

The reason being that we want to make sure that engagement rates are improving across all types of audiences; we're not just adding a lot of fans/followers who aren't as likely to engage and they're not interacting with their community.

We also have trends in mind when tracking our overall performance. We track the rate at which our tweets and blog posts gain followers, likes and shares. We also track our Klout score (or if we’re connected to a social media team, the score might be something called an “integrity score”) and how much of a moment on Twitter we create whenever someone mentions us (not just retweets).

Where do you see the future of Digital PR going?

Digital PR will continue to use social media in a strategic way throughout all of its campaigns.

Conclusion: Digital PR is going to continue to evolve and create many new opportunities.

Jordan Bitterman, Senior Media Relations Manager at Netflix

The future of digital PR is going to be about more connections with people who care about what you have to say. That can happen on social media, but it can also happen through email. The data we have at Netflix suggests that email campaigns result in a greater number of responses than social media (compared to the same number of people reached through each channel). We know that email click rates are much higher than those on social sites. Additionally, our subscribers are twice as likely to make a recommendation about Netflix through email than they are through Twitter.