Social Engagement: The Intersection of Targeting and Monitoring

NEW YORK, Jan. 16, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Social media is truly a double-edged sword: not only do today's channels allow you to broadcast brand news, product announcements, and curated content publicly, they also call for a targeted, two-way conversation. Given this evolution in brand dialogue, marketing and communications professionals are finding monitoring to be as important a component in their efforts as targeting has historically been. The need to keep abreast of important trends, topics and breaking news in your industry, and to identify the key players in the conversations, is growing daily, and is a necessary step to take before targeting influencers and media outlets.

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PR Newswire announced several updates to its Agility platform, which were developed to strengthen Agility's social media monitoring capabilities, and to increase the ease-of-use of its robust media and influencer targeting database. These enhancements will help corporate communicators and social media marketers develop more precise lists for media outreach, and provide a much more meaningful view of the social media landscape, its influential voices, and the topics generating buzz.

To learn more about gaining targeted attention and leveraging the industry's largest distribution network with PR Newswire's Agility Platform, visit:  prnewswire.com/products-services/agility.

The Agility platform combines powerful media targeting tools with social media monitoring and PR Newswire's unparalleled content distribution and reporting capabilities. With its upgraded content, data and features, Agility's clients will be able to:

• Find more journalist, blogger and outlet information quickly – including the author's preferred method of contact, Twitter user name and handle.
• Track more – and more relevant –Twitter feeds from the firehose.
• Monitor Facebook for the most relevant posts, with noise filtered out.
• Follow and analyze social conversations in English, Spanish and French.
• Access historical data from social, print, web, and blog monitoring content to gauge trends affecting campaigns and communications programs.

"Even as owned media channels proliferate, earned media is still important. We recently surveyed our community of journalists, and 75% cited email and 68% mentioned press releases as primary sources for story ideas," said Martin Murtland, Senior Vice President of Platforms and Data, PR Newswire. "However they receive the pitch, journalists and bloggers want relevant story ideas, and thorough, well-thought-out pitches. With Agility's upgrades to outlet, contact and monitoring data and tools, PR and marketing professionals can cut down on the time it takes to plan, execute and evaluate their media campaigns, gaining the targeted attention that translates to achieving business goals."

For an example of the Agility Platform in action, please visit our Beyond PR Blog.

About PR Newswire                                   

PR Newswire (www.prnewswire.com) is the premier global provider of multimedia platforms that enable marketers, corporate communicators, sustainability officers, public affairs and investor relations officers to leverage content to engage with all their key audiences. Having pioneered the commercial news distribution industry 60 years ago, PR Newswire today provides end-to-end solutions to produce, optimize and target content -- from rich media to online video to multimedia -- and then distribute content and measure results across traditional, digital, mobile and social channels. Combining the world's largest multi-channel, multi-cultural content distribution and optimization network with comprehensive workflow tools and platforms, PR Newswire enables the world's enterprises to engage opportunity everywhere it exists. PR Newswire serves tens of thousands of clients from offices in the Americas, Europe, Middle East, Africa and the Asia-Pacific region, and is a UBM plc company.

Media Contacts:

Caitlin Carragee
Manager, Marketing Communications
201.360.6363 
[email protected]

SOURCE PR Newswire Association LLC