Social listening tools are designed to help businesses to monitor and track conversations about their brand, competitors, or products. They can also be useful in the case of political PR campaigns, which is what we’re focusing on today.
Advantages of social listening tools
Some of the best social listening tools can help you find the real-time pulse of your environment and make better decisions as a politician.
To realize the full potential of these tools, you should know how they work and what advantages they have that could significantly improve your next political PR campaigns.
1. Monitor
Social listening tools can help you to monitor mentions about you on Social Media and websites.
This way, you can identify what people think about you or your party and react accordingly. You can also create a political PR campaign according to the feedback from social media.
The tools can provide information about what people are saying in relation to specific topics, people, or events. They also provide data about their location, language, and preferred channels.
All of this can make it easy for you to target different kinds of people with your PR campaigns, depending on your needs.
2. Search
Such tools are also great when you want to find something specific on the Internet. Thanks to advanced search engines, unlimited keyword configuration, and location filters, you can quickly locate exactly what you’re looking for.
Whether these are sources, authors, queries, or particular tags, with a good social listening tool, you’ll get your results in the blink of an eye.
3. Analyze
There is a lot of data out there. A reliable social listening tool can effortlessly undertake an analysis of all impressions, social media engagement, and more.
This could be of crucial importance in case of trying to quickly analyze how the public perceives you or your party.
Moreover, everything can be summarized in highly accessible custom PDF reports. This way, you don’t end up with hundreds of pages of mentions, interactions, and comments to familiarize yourself with.
5 Best social listening tools for your political PR campaign
There are many tools you could use. Each of them also offers different features that will be useful to various people.
Before you say yes to that one solution, though, always make sure to do some research in advance. This could include checking out the reviews on websites like Capterra and G2, comparing different features, or even testing tools out through free trials.
#1 Mediatoolkit
Mediatoolkit is a solution that allows you to listen, monitor, and analyze what’s happening on across the web, including social media – yours or your political opponents’. Political PR is not always easy, so it’s worth having a good tool at your fingertips.
Mediatoolkit is certainly one of the most powerful social listening tools which can help you find out what people are saying about you and your activities as a politician.
You can then use this knowledge to create more engaging content for your audience, tailor your PR campaigns to its views and even post your content in the best moments in time.
What else does it offer?
Extensive media campaign reports and data management features
This includes very useful PDF and Excel exports, individual graphs, and unlimited data storage allowances – all so you don’t miss any important mentions about your party or other politicians!
Relevant queries
With Mediatoolkit, you can also track important queries. These could include your candidate’s name, your party name, specific slogan, the names of opponents, the names of opposition parties, key figures, public discussions, and more!
All this will provide you with a comprehensive overview of your most relevant environments so that you can track, analyze and compare – all to make your political PR campaigns better each time.
Real-time updates
Such announcements could be daily digests, mobile and Slack notifications, as well as custom virality alerts sent directly to your phone.
Messages could include details about mentions, hashtags, or comments about your party, other political organizations, other politicians, and more. Thanks to these updates, you also receive Spike alerts which will make it easy to spot a fast-growing crisis, for example.
Campaign sentiment analysis
If you’re curious to know how other candidates or campaigns are perceived by your core audience, sentiment analysis is here to help you. With automatic, effective, and manual options to choose from, you will be able to effortlessly evaluate what people talk about you or your opponents.
Real-time, effective customer support
This type of help is available through email, telephone, and chat – this way you have multiple communication channels at your disposal.
All in all, Mediatoolkit will definitely be useful as it offers a wide range of features that could help you as a politician.
If you’re hesitant about it, there’s nothing to worry about. Since there’s a free trial available for you to see if this tool is suitable for your needs, you can cancel it anytime and you lose absolutely nothing.
You’ll be surprised by how big of an impact it can have on the performance of your next political campaign!
Pricing: A free plan is available, while paid plans start at 249€.
#2 Brand24
Another tool worth taking a look at is Brand24.
Whether you’re in need of resources that will make your online reputation management easy, or you simply want a powerful program to monitor social media – Brand24 is a good option.
Some of the features you can expect it to provide, depending on which subscription plan you’re on, include:
- mentions feed,
- discussion volume chart,
- marketing analytics,
- influence score,
- alerts,
- data exporting
to name a few examples.
You don’t need to purchase any subscription plans to benefit from the services this tool can offer you. There’s a useful Help Center, free e-books on social listening to download, or even a podcast on Spotify to listen to.
Sadly, this solution doesn’t offer you any CRM (customer relationship management) features. Also, some users have reported that the engine sometimes leaves you with too many mentions that could be irrelevant to your party or other competitors. Keep this in mind should you wish to use it.
Pricing: Prices start at $49 per month.
#3 Brandwatch
The next point of our focus when it comes to social media monitoring tools is Brandwatch.
Apart from operating in the Technology, Media and Entertainment, and Retail industries, this tool will do a great job helping you plan your next political PR campaign.
If you’re curious to find out what people say about you or your political opponents, you might want to check it out.
It will be great in cases like:
Crisis management
When your reputation as a politician is hit by a crisis, every second counts. It will ensure that you do not miss a critical mention and that you have the tools to guide you through these moments.
Competitor analysis
Benchmarking your marketing performance and political awareness against all of your competitors is easy with this platform. You can also use it to discover deeper consumer insights that can contribute to coming up with a competitive strategy.
Trend analysis
They say that you can’t predict the future without analyzing the past. Use this feature to analyze trends shaping your audience. This way, you will be able to address them quickly to ensure the best results of your PR campaigns.
There are also reports, guides, and webinars waiting for you at Brandwatch, so do take advantage of those!
Similar to Brand24, however, this tool’s search engine could also use some refining, as users often receive way too many spam mentions.
Pricing: Prices start at $800 per month.
#Brandmentions
Moving on, let’s look at BrandMentions. This is yet another social media and Internet monitoring tool.
Its most important aim is to successfully and efficiently identify all mentions about you online.
With clients including companies like eToro and iProspect, BrandMentions seems like a reliable solution. Similar to competitors, it offers features like brand monitoring, reputation management, competitor analysis, and even business intelligence resources.
There are 3 subscription plans to choose from. The plan pricing ranges from $99, all the way up to $499. A drawback that could be a dealbreaker here is the fact that you can only take advantage of the real-time alerts and white-labeled reports if you have an agency plan.
Pricing: Prices start at $99 per month.
#Talkwalker
Finally, our last recommendation is Talkwalker – a highly effective audience intelligence engine. This particular tool does a great job with everything related to campaign strategy, competitive intelligence, and market research.
Considering how many industries Talkwalker caters to, including the Government and Public sector, it may be worth giving it a try.
Using Talkwalker, you can go through the latest topics per region and day of the week. It’s also useful for exploring specific conversations on specific social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.
All this information can be used to help decide what your next PR campaign should look like.
You can request a free demo of this tool to test the waters out anytime as well. This way, you get to ‘try before you buy’, which, in the case of tools like this, often turns out to be very beneficial.
If it’s important for you to closely monitor your political opponents or mentions about your party on Facebook and LinkedIn though – Talkwalker may not be for you. This is because this tool doesn’t support real-time monitoring on these platforms. So just something to be aware of!
Pricing: Prices start at $9,600 per year.
Social media and political PR campaigns – how to make it work? Tips
Although social media marketing has been here for a while, there are still topics and areas misunderstood by people, including even the most talented marketers.
Here we give you three powerful tips to improve your political PR campaign efforts on social media.
#1 Don’t limit yourself to just one platform
A common mistake made by people that don’t tend to spend a lot of time on social media, for example, politicians, is their limitation in terms of the platforms used.
When they finally decide to start building their presence on social media sites, a lot of the time they don’t pick the best ones.
What’s important for you to do is pick a platform that will most closely resonate with your target audience – your current or future supporters.
For instance, if your main target audience is Gen Z, you might want to focus primarily on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok – as these are the platforms most commonly used by this generation.
When you’re active on several social media sites, always ensure that the message you’re trying to communicate is consistent with all your profiles. This way, you’re portraying yourself as an authentic, professional, and reliable individual.
#2 Use visual content
Once you identify where most of your target audience is, it’s time to think about the type of content you’re going to use.
No matter what your goal on social media is, the rule with visual content is always the same: use it whenever you can.
Visual content, such as videos, photographs, and graphics, significantly outperform textual content from the perspective of human memory. Since people, in general, have a very short memory span, you can increase it by posting visually appealing, interesting, and memorable content.
Moreover, it’s worth paying attention to how you actually display your videos and images as well.
To give you an example, research has proven that mobile vertical video marketing increases audience interest and engagement more, compared to horizontal video marketing.
Thus, you may want to do some more digging before you actually start engaging with video and image marketing.
#3 Engage with your audience
Lastly, engaging with your political party supporters could significantly improve your social media efforts. Actually, the importance of interacting with your followers on a regular basis cannot be overemphasized.
Showing your voters that you’re not there just to publish a photo or a video and disappear has many advantages.
One, you create a relationship with them. Two, your engagement rate on social media increases, meaning your exposure will also increase. And three – the more active and engaging you’re on social media, the better your PR is.
Ultimately, people want to see you engaging with them – being present is simply not enough. Doing this will help with building relationships, trust, authenticity, visibility, and your overall branding as a politician.
Over to you
You’ve reached the end of this article. We believe that you now have a better understanding of the role social listening tools play in political PR campaigns, as well as how to approach social media as a politician.
While there are many social media monitoring tools out there that make it easy to find these conversations and see feedback from people, a solution that lies most close to our hearts is Mediatoolkit. Not only is it effective, but also easy to use. Not to mention, you get the best value for the price you pay.
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