How to Track News About a Company

Still googling your way to find out everything being said about your company?

Well, that is one way to do it. Not completely efficient, though.

Tracking news about your brand or company manually can only do so much. In the age of social media and platforms like Reddit, when it takes but a few comments to ruin your reputation or for something to go viral, googling is not enough. And it’s definitely time-consuming.

? Read Media Monitoring: The Ultimate Guide

Luckily, today there are tools that do the leg work for you. They not only track everything being said about your company, but they also have alerting and reporting systems that enable you to dig deeper into every context and understand the reasoning behind certain opinions. 

Why to Track News About Your Company Anyway?

Apart from being curious, there are several vital reasons why following conversations around your brand or company is a must.

• Brand reputation. It’s one thing how you’d like your brand image to appear. But it can be something completely different from how the wider audience sees it. Tracking how the news of your company is received and commented on can reveal a great deal about the latter.
• Crisis management. According to PWC, 69% of business leaders reported experiencing a crisis over a period of five years, with the average number of crises being three. As mentioned, nowadays, a new crisis is just a social media comment away. If you track the news of your company in real-time, you can respond on time and prevent it from escalating and damaging your brand reputation.
• Campaign tracking. Setting up your marketing campaigns and sending them out in the world is not a one-way street. You can think you’ve figured out the best way to present yourself, but how the audience perceives it, in the end, is what matters. Tracking all sources where the campaign is commented on will give you the opportunity to change its course and learn.
• Competitive analysis. Besides tracking the news about your company, you can track what is being said about your competitors, too. In this way, you can evaluate your own marketing efforts, find market gaps, learn from their mistakes, and find new opportunities for your business.

5 Steps to Master News Tracking for Your Company

Set up a media monitoring tool and track mentions regularly

First things first – you need a good media monitoring tool. After that – it gets much simpler.

What it does is actually pretty powerful.

The tool collects all mentions of your desired keyword (your company, key people, competitors, etc.) from all available sources (websites, social media, forums, review pages, etc.) and sends them to your feed in real time. From there, you can easily see where each mention is from (website, social media platform, etc.)  and some key metrics like its influence or engagement. 

To save you the trouble, some of the tools, like Determ, offer the option of digests – which is an overview of your mentions that comes directly to your email inbox. You can schedule it and check all your mentions regularly, for example, every morning at 8 when you come to the office.

Pay attention to how people feel

But monitoring every mention of your company is just the beginning. The next phase is to dig deeper and check how people really feel. This is where inspecting the sentiment of the mentions plays a key role.

Sentiment analysis is the process of analyzing texts to decide upon the tone of the message – whether it’s positive, negative, or neutral. And it’s an integral part of every better media monitoring tool. Apart from analyzing particular mentions, you can also get an overview of the overall sentiment of all your mentions, track how it changes over time, and see if there are any unusual spikes in the number of positive or negative mentions. 

Read Top 5 Examples of Sentiment Analysis

Remember Burger King’s Women’s Day tweet in 2021 that got a lot of backlash, so they had to remove it and apologize? This is how its sentiment analysis looked. 

A pretty good depiction of how the audience felt about their campaign, wouldn’t you agree?

Use alerts

Another amazing media monitoring feature is alerts. Customized alerts can be set up through your media monitoring tool, ensuring you never miss anything being said about your company. 

Whether it’s alerts for web mentions or social media alerts for specific keywords and hashtags, these notifications provide real-time updates about your company’s online presence.

In other words, you can get a notification directly to your email whenever the keyword you set up for tracking is mentioned or when there is an unusual spike in the mentions.

Alerts are invaluable for crisis management, enabling you to respond promptly to any negative sentiment or emerging issues. They also help you track the success of marketing campaigns and gauge audience reactions, allowing you to make data-driven adjustments to your strategies.

Read 5 Benefits of Real Time Alerts for Your Brand

Check reports

Once you have set up media monitoring tools and utilized alerts to keep track of news about your company, the next step is to check reports regularly. These reports provide comprehensive insights into your company’s media presence, sentiment analysis, and overall performance. 

Analyzing the reports helps you identify trends, strengths, and areas for improvement. You can measure the effectiveness of your PR and marketing efforts, gauge audience sentiment towards recent campaigns, and assess the impact of crisis management responses.

Additionally, comparing your performance with that of your competitors allows you to refine your strategies and capitalize on new opportunities. 

Read Create an Amazing Online Media Report in Minutes (Using Our 2000 Custom Charts)

Utilize the power of AI

To truly elevate your news tracking efforts and gain a competitive advantage, use the power of Artificial Intelligence. AI-driven media monitoring tools are revolutionizing how companies track and analyze news about their brand. These advanced tools employ natural language processing algorithms to sift through vast amounts of data, allowing for a more accurate and context-based understanding of mentions.

AI can identify trends, patterns, and emerging issues that might be challenging to detect manually. Moreover, machine learning algorithms continually improve the accuracy of the results over time, providing more valuable and actionable insights.

For example, Determ’s AI assistant Synthia summarizes your top most influential mentions, analyzes what they’re about, their tone of voice and sentiment and it provides a set of actionable tips that you can use to up your strategy. In addition, it provides a set of keywords that you can track in addition to get a broader perspective of what you’re interested in.

Read Revolutionizing PR: How AI-powered Media Monitoring Can Benefit PR Professionals

To Conclude

Tracking news about your company is an indispensable practice for modern businesses. Relying solely on manual methods can be time-consuming and ineffective, especially in the era of social media and instant communication. By adopting media monitoring tools and setting up alerts, you can efficiently monitor mentions, assess sentiment, and respond promptly to any emerging issues or opportunities. Moreover, regularly checking reports provides you with data-driven insights, enabling you to fine-tune your strategies and maintain a positive brand reputation. Embracing AI-powered media monitoring takes your news-tracking efforts to a whole new level, unlocking deeper insights, identifying trends, and empowering you with the knowledge needed to thrive in a competitive market. 

If you’d like to find out more about how media monitoring tool Determ can help you book a demo with our experts, and let’s find the best way to track news about your company.