With each day, more and more people are online – whether just browsing the online content, resharing it, or creating it.
Someone out there is writing a tweet or creating a video about your favorite topic at this exact second. As beautiful as the growth of the online community is, it also made it hard to keep up with only the topics that interest you.
For example, you may want to read only the news related to a specific event, brand, industry, or topic. Just following a particular hashtag on Twitter won’t be enough. The entire Internet is a vast cloud of information – it’s vital to cover all grounds while filtering out all irrelevant information.
Luckily, with the rise of the Internet came the rise of online solutions. To receive all the news which is important to you – use the help of real-time news tracking.
What is Real-Time News Tracking?
Real-time news tracking is the process of getting the most recent news on a particular topic in real-time.
For example, let’s say you want to be notified whenever the topic of oil price change is mentioned anywhere online. If, say, CNN publishes an article about oil price changes, you’ll get notified immediately about CNN’s article with real-time news tracking. Or any other mention of your tracked topic. That way, you can only receive the news you’re interested in without having to scroll through the sea of irrelevant articles.
Besides that, real-time news tracking means getting the news delivered to you instead of scraping the Internet manually one source at a time.
Let’s dig deeper into these and many other benefits of real-time news tracking.
The Main Benefits of Real-Time News Tracking
Having fresh news delivered to you instantly seems like a great deal on the face of it. Here are some practical benefits that you can get from real-time news tracking.
Preventing a crisis (or softening the blow)
If there’s bad PR surrounding your product or brand, especially if it’s covered in a news article, you should be among the first to know about it. You know the saying – good news travels fast, but bad news travels faster.
Even if you have a PR team, they’re likely focused on tasks other than refreshing news websites all day, waiting for new mentions about your topic of interest.
If a crisis occurs, it’s important to be the first to hear the news. That way, you’ll be able to react as soon as possible, put out a statement, calm down your customers, and have a handle on things.
The deed is done when news comes out, and there is no going back. However, you can make the best out of a bad situation and react swiftly before things get worse with real-time news tracking.
Read 4 Ways To Improve Your Crisis Communications Strategy
Keeping an eye on the competition
Just as you want to monitor the news about yourself, you should also be in the loop about competitor news. Whatever the press (or content creators, influencers, their clients, etc.) says about them is worth knowing.
For instance, if your competitor launches a new product, you should be aware. Not keeping up with the latest industry trends could make your customers choose your competition over you. It’s worth having all competitor information available immediately to improve your own product or services and compete at a higher level.
Same way, stepping into the conversation when your competitors’ clients are dissatisfied with their services could bring their clients closer to you.
Staying on top of industry trends
If you’re in a competitive industry, you’ll want to know the movers and shakers and what they’re up to.
Your competitors are constantly coming up with new improvements to their products or services, teaming up with new partners, and starting new initiatives. Besides the established players in your industry, new ones are constantly arising. Real-time news tracking helps you stay on top of the latest industry trends to offer the same and better solutions to your clients than your competition does. Let’s see how to get started with it.
How to Get started With Real-Time News Tracking
#1 Choose the right tool
There are plenty of media monitoring tools that are your go-to solution for real-time news tracking. The media monitoring market is becoming highly competitive, and while these tools seem similar, you want to look out for a set of critical features that sort out the best of them.
Choose a powerful media monitoring tool
The ideal news tracking tool needs to send in new media mentions as soon as they show up. Even a few minutes of delay could mean a massive difference in handling a crisis.
Choose a media monitoring tool that covers the entire web
Many tools for tracking news mentions work on social media channels only. To get all the relevant news about your topics of interest, you need a tool covering the entire Internet: websites, blogs, forums, social media comments – anything that you can think of.
Luckily, Determ, an award-winning media monitoring and social listening tool fits these preconditions for successful real-time news tracking.
#2 Choose the term(s) you want to track
Once you’ve selected the right tool for news tracking in real-time, it’s time to set it up. The sky is the limit here, but our first suggestion is to track your brand and product names. For example, if you’re working at Adidas, track your brand name but also the name of your competitor.
You also want to track industry-specific terms to stay in the loop about the latest developments in your field. For example, tracking the term “conversational AI” would be good if you’re in customer support. And, of course, you want to track the general, overarching topics that your customers may be interested in, such as “CRM software,” to find out what the news outlets bloggers are writing about. We recommend you brainstorm your potential topics in your weekly team meetings.
#3 Receive real-time notifications
As new mentions of your target terms show up, you’ll get notified immediately. When you log into your Determ account, you’ll get an overview of the latest mentions of those terms, neatly sorted by order of appearance.
Not a fan of logging into the tool all the time? You don’t have to. You can set up Slack notifications to get all the news in a dedicated Slack channel.
#4 React quickly
With real-time notifications, you can react to any news immediately.
You can avoid a crisis if you reply to negative news as soon as possible but do not ignore the power of responding to positive or neutral news. You’re building a relationship with news outlets and your audience by answering and reacting in time. That way, you’re making a trustworthy brand.
#5 Start analyzing news mentions
Receiving notifications about news about your topic of interest is essential because it gives you a chance to always be in the know and react in real-time if you need to. But, just collecting the news mentions is not enough. It is vital to use other benefits of media monitoring tools – thorough analyses. From sentiment analysis to competitor analysis, media monitoring tools will give you all the crucial information regarding online mentions you decided to track. For example, when you take a look at the news that comes in, you can determine:
- Which platforms write the most about your topic of interest
- The sentiment of articles(positive, neutral, negative)
- Which authors frequently write the news articles
- How the online mentions you’re tracking have been trending over time (watch out for spikes, seasonal traffic increase, etc.)
You can see all of these data bits in your Determ dashboard, neatly broken down into categories. If you have clients that you do marketing or PR for, you can export the report in a few clicks and send it their way immediately.
#6 Set up a plan for your business
Once you have the option to set up real-time news tracking for your most essential alerts, you can devise a strategy for how your entire team will react to new mentions.
Depending on the source and the type of mentions, you can determine the course of action. For example:
- Gather new mentions
- Reply to the authors
- Share the news on your profiles
- When you release new updates, reach out to those authors for collaboration
This is just an example of a workflow that you can set up, but anything goes here. You can include your marketing, customer support, sales, or other teams in the process.
#7 Track sentiment over time
One of the neat aspects of Determ is that it does an excellent sentiment analysis for you in just a few seconds. For each mention you score, the sophisticated AI analyzes it and shows you whether it’s positive, negative, or neutral.
For instance, if you see a sudden spike in negative sentiment, it’s a sign that some online buzz needs your immediate attention.
Besides tracking at the moment, you can track customer/author sentiment over time to see how others talked about your brand, product, or industry in the past period. You can track your competitors too, and see if there’s an opportunity for you to take a slice of the market.
#8 See how you stack up against your competitors
The great thing about real-time news tracking is that you’re not limited in what terms you can track. And while you may be tempted to track new mentions of pop-tarts, one of the best uses is to monitor your competitors.
In Determ, you can see how you stand compared to the competition by:
- Number of total mentions
- Share of voice
- Mentions over time
- Top influencers
- Mentions by channels
- Number of mentions per sentiment
You can see immediately when news pops up about your competition, giving you time to come up with a response or a strategy that will help you stand out. For example, you can notice which outlets frequently cover your competitors and ask if they’d be interested in covering a story about you.
Tracking the public sentiment around your competitors’ news mentions is also a great idea to build a long-term marketing and PR strategy.
Start with real-time news tracking today
Anyone can go to Google and find the latest news on their topic of interest. However, this barely scratches the surface, leaving you without lots of critical news coverage.
Instead of trying to cover mentions of recent news manually, use the help of a media monitoring tool that monitors the web 24/7 and gathers news, and any other mentions, about your product, brand, or any other term that you can come up with.
Ready to get started? Book a call with one of our experts and test our tool!
