Whether you are stuck on social platforms or a die hard traditional media fan — your brand needs both traditional media monitoring and social analytics to reach a wide audience and be successful.
In today's fragmented media landscape, where brands are talked about across both traditional (print, broadcast, online publications) and social (Instagram, X, Facebook) platforms, it's imperative for brands to keep an eye on each.
While each provides valuable insights, integrating both is the key to gaining a full picture of your brand's media presence. PR professionals, in particular, can greatly benefit from a holistic view when these two powerful tools work together.
Traditional Media Monitoring
Traditional media monitoring is the tracking of your brand and your competitors' mentions across newspapers, magazines, radio, TV and online publications.
This monitoring allows brands to gain insights into:
- credibility and influence of earned media
- depth of analysis in longer-form journalism, and
- regular brand observation.
Social Media Analytics
Social media analytics involves gathering, evaluating and analysing data from various social media platforms to understand your customers, assess competitors and identify industry trends.
The key benefits include:
- feedback and sentiment analysis
- audience engagement metrics (likes, shares, comments)
- influencer tracking, and
- UGC trends.
Why Integration Matters
The reason brands need to integrate both social media analytics with traditional media monitoring is because traditional and social media tell different sides of the same story.
Integrating both allows brands to:
- identify where a story broke and how it evolved online
- understand audience sentiment versus journalistic framing, and
- spot reputational risks early and assess cross-channel impact.
Key Metrics to Compare and Correlate
Once you have the insights you need, there are a few metrics that brands should focus on.
For traditional media monitoring, focus on:
- AVE (Advertising Value Equivalency)
- reach
- tone, and
- message pull-through.
For social media monitoring, focus on:
- engagement rate
- sentiment
- impressions, and
- virality.
By combining these, it will reveal your ROI, brand health and narrative effectiveness.
Modern PR is no longer an either / or — it's about both. To truly understand your brand’s media presence and public perception, integrating social and traditional analytics is non-negotiable.
Found this blog interesting? Then take a look at Why Every Brand Needs a Media Monitoring Strategy — Not Just Big Corporates.
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