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How to Boost PR Campaigns With Social Data

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By Jason Edelboim

President of Cision Americas

 

As social media becomes woven into the workflow of communications professionals, it can feel daunting to understand what content will resonate with your influencers and the target audiences that engage with them.  

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Cision Communications Cloud®’s “Matterhorn” release arms communicators with the tools they need to deepen their understanding of what influencers say about their brand on social channels and how that shapes the behavior and sentiment of their target audience.   

1. Know What Influencers Say About Your Brand, And Gauge Their Impact on Your Target Audience  

The idea that brands can monitor social content and conversations has been around for a decade now. And while companies have often focused on customer support or general engagement with consumers as the primary use case for the social channel, the PR professionals have been under-served in terms of knowing which journalists and influencers on social channels matter the most to their campaigns. 

The Cision Comms Cloud™ is filling that gap by enabling communications teams to understand which key influencers engage on topics important to their brand and whether those influencers generate the desired interactions with their target audience. For example, for a retailer that wants to understand how people responded to coverage on a new store opening, users can quickly pull a holistic view of the photos, videos and comments related to that event generated by influencers. The platform now measures and analyzes content from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. Because it’s all integrated into the Comms Cloud™, PR pros can monitor social alongside their monitoring of traditional print, broadcast and online news coverage. 

 

2. Leverage Social Data to Craft More Effective Campaigns And Better Engage Your Target Audience

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It’s one thing to gather social insight; it’s what you do with it that counts. While real-time social monitoring allows you to quickly respond to influencers and customers, the real opportunity for communicators is to proactively shape messaging around their future campaigns. 

With the help of Cision Comms Cloud™, communicators can identify which content is most impactful across social channels based on the level of audience engagement. For example, let’s say that the same retailer mentioned above, announces an exciting new campaign they are running in conjunction with the Miami Dolphins. The team runs a press release, contacts online news media outlets and launches a social campaign directly from the platform. As their story gets picked up and retweeted, their communications team can identify important social posts and engagement statistics linked to the announcement. Furthermore, they can create categories within the Comms Cloud™ to understand key trends in those social conversations to then promote the products or topics that sparked the most engagement with their target audience. Using Cision’s URL tracking, the retailer might notice that content posted directly from the Miami Dolphin’s Twitter handle performed better than coverage from popular sports networks. With that data, they know to continue investing in coverage from key sponsors.

 3. Understand How Your Social Campaigns Drive Value

Unlike other earned media channels, public relations teams cannot rank social posts by UVPM or publicity value, but instead, they rely on ranking by statistics such as social following. Other technology vendors often flaunt their ability to capture social amplification data, but in many cases, these are simply vanity metrics. While important, consider the number of likes, comments and shares to be the bare minimum when it comes to understanding your brand’s impact on social networks.  

Cision’s “Matterhorn” launch has empowered PR pros to take action on social data, streamlining the process of identifying the most impactful social posts linked to their brand, offering, or competition. Communicators are now able to sort social audience and engagement data to quickly determine which authors and posts are gaining the most traction from top to bottom. The previously mentioned retail company can also evaluate how various influencers compare to each other on social regarding a specific campaign. This will help to inform their brand’s influencer strategy moving forward, ensuring they focus on those that have the largest impact on their target audience. 

Communications teams will also be able to easily access charts and easy-to-share dashboards to visualize social data in the way that matters most to their brand and internal audiences. With the ability to filter this data by any number of custom categories, PR pros are finally able to find the meaning behind the numbers. Our retailer, after announcing their partnership with the Miami Dolphins, could go beyond overall mentions, and leverage engagement and follower data to identify which elements of the campaign drove the most interest.

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Cision Comms Cloud™ helps PR and comms professionals evaluate whether their news is reaching the right audience, is engaging on social channels and most-importantly, impacting business results.