7 Online Tools for PR Pros to Propel their Efforts
By: Isah Ismaila Gagarawa
In this interconnected world where companies and organisations are always prone to an increasing social media appearance and presence, there are lots of opportunities that Public Relations Professional can seamlessly achieve. Most importantly, building media relations and easily managing your social media platforms through proper monitoring of contents and campaigns.
However, as boosting social media efforts is important for professionals, there are diverse and incredible online tools or applications that are readily available for public Relations professionals to harness in aiding them achieve a lot – almost for free. These tools can be very handy most especially when PR Pros are on a very low budget and it will go a long way in promoting your brands, campaigns or contents.
Some of these online tools and applications are randomly listed below:
Hootsuite
This tool is very handy when it comes to saving a lot of time. This is because it allows you to schedule social media posts for your various platforms -most especially when you have a lot of handles to distribute contents on. It will help reduce your engagement time to the minimum.
It also allows you to distribute contents on platforms such as twitter when you login as swiftly as possible. If you don’t want your account to look dormant, Hootsuite should be your daily friend for its swiftness in issuing replies on tweets.
#Journorequest
This tool helps you find media relations opportunities almost for free and offers a free trial too. If you want to get high-profile press coverage for your PR campaign without writing a press releases, #journorequest can be a brilliant resource.
HARO
Is an acronym of Help a Reporter Out. It serves as a source for newsmen to find sources for their stories quickly based on varied sectors and industries. Through HARO, you can come across opportunities as a PR professional for your organization. And when you answer or respond to a query accurately, your will be cited as an expert source and by being cited, you are likely to boost your SEO.
Google Analytics
This tool helps you as a PR professional track your contents and campaign by reporting website traffic to you. Also, it helps you as a PR professional to know how people are visiting your site, track leads and even know how long they spend on your site. When you fully explore google analytics, the data can help you research and plan better campaigns.
Pixabay
With a free registration, this tool offers you as a PR Pro free quality pictures, clips or illustrations that you can attach to or support your contents and campaigns without necessarily attributing the source.
Google Alerts
If you really want to save a lot of money as a PR professional on monitoring of campaigns, then, you should consider exploring google alert. It is a content change and notification service that sends email of mentions, articles or page to your inbox. And the wonderful thing is that, it is absolutely free.
BuzzSumo
This research tool helps you to monitor your social media channels, contents and shares by also bringing traffic to your site. It also helps you find influencers for you campaigns at the same time; helps you track your key competitors by analyzing their contents.
Well, these tools are not exhaustive because there are a lot of tools that PR Professionals can use to boost their online (digital) presence. However, harnessing these tools into your activities and plans will propel your Public Relations efforts.
Gagarawa is a graduate of Mass Communication from Bayero University, Kano and he’s currently serving with Image Merchants Promotion Limited (6 times Public Relations Golden World Award winners), in Abuja.
