How Can Public Relations Pros Monitor Public Opinion

One of the fundamentals of public relations is tracking and monitoring the opinion of the public. Additionally, in the past few years, thanks to social media, it has become easier than ever for PR pros to keep track of what the public is thinking or talking about when it comes to particular brands.

When it comes to social media, aside from the fact that it’s an excellent tool for publicity, and free publicity at that, it allows brands to directly communicate with a target audience without going through intermediaries, such as the media. It’s also important to keep track of what that audience is saying when a brand isn’t directly promoting a product or a service.

A solid public relations strategy or campaign involves a plan that always includes an analysis of the market and the target audience, as well as the key messages and tactics. However, to ensure that a campaign is truly effective, all of the tactics must be monitored, measured and evaluated, which is usually done by monitoring the opinions of the public.

Returns on Impressions, Media Impact, Target Investment or Earned Media

When it comes to monitoring the public opinion, the main focus is on the numbers of ROI, ROMI, ROTI as well as ROEM . These numbers point out the number of impressions a campaign got, the sales in connection with media coverage, the sales themselves, as well as the value of advertising, respectively.

There are several different techniques that can be used to measure these numbers, and all of them are slightly different and employ different rules. However, the use of these techniques is the same – measuring the effectiveness of a PR campaign.

Surveys and Focus Groups

One of the main ways that most companies tend to monitor public opinion is via surveys or focus groups. These are usually carried out both before as well as after a PR tactic has been implemented so that the company can precisely see how effective that particular tactic has been with the audience.

Focus groups and customer surveys are great ways to demonstrate the effectiveness of a PR campaign to a brand or a company, to clearly see which tactic is not working and which one is very effective.

Measuring Social Media Impact

Finally, there is also a way to monitor public opinion by focusing on social media platforms, and these techniques can be used on each social platform separately or combined, depending on the direction of the PR strategy of the client.

Some of the metrics that can be followed on social media include the cost per impression, the cost per engagement, the cost per click, the cost per site visitor, the cost per inbound link, and finally, the cost per subscriber.

While there are plenty of other ways that brands and companies can keep up with the public opinion via the traditional media outlets, these are some of the ones that are only going to grow in popularity due to the increase of digital PR in the last few years.