Top 5 Media Monitoring tools for PR professionals in Africa

When it comes to media monitoring in Africa, PR professionals on the continent adopt several approaches. So far, many adopt the manual approach of hiring independent media monitoring agencies to comb several news sources and present periodic reports on a brand’s performance in the media.

However, with the advent of many media monitoring software, some PR pros are beginning to automate their PR operations, while integrating some media monitoring tools into their mainstream tools.

Below, we explore some of the most popular media monitoring tools in Africa for PR professionals.

1. Meltwater: Top on the list is Meltwater because it has really gained traction among PR pros as a media monitoring tool in Africa.

Meltwater has been around for over two decades, providing media intelligence and monitoring across online news, print, broadcast, and consumer review sites. The company also claims to capture the most content and conversations in the industry.

It monitors over 300,000 online news sources and 300 million blogs, including publications focused on Africa.

Its brand monitoring tool tracks selected keywords and aggregate all matching content. Its social listening tool can monitor Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, Twitch, Pinterest, TikTok, blogs, message boards, and discussion forums.

However, meltwater still has some limitations, as “some reviewers report inconsistent social media tracking and scheduling, especially around Facebook and Instagram. Social media dashboards from other companies may be needed to cover these gaps in monitoring,” according to a recent report cited by Prowly in a blog post.

2. Muck Rack: Muck Rack is reputed for its rich media database but it also offers monitoring services.

Like Meltwater, Muck Rack also claims to monitor several news sources and deliver real-time automated alerts for clients.

The Muck Rack tool also allows PR pros in Africa to easily follow journalists that cover their industries, especially their social media activity.

However, its media database lacks depth in Africa, and contacting journalists is restricted to their social media handles, which can be a bit tricky especially if a journalist allows only restricted access to their inboxes.

More so, reviewers also think that its mentioned monitoring tool is sensitive to outside issues, while reporting is not flexible, as many would like.

3. Mention: Mention is becoming quite popular among PR pros as a media monitoring tool in Africa. Brand reputation managers in Africa use Mention to filter news mentions by sources, sentiment, reach, location, etc.

It is also because it is far more cost-effective than Meltwater and Muck Rack, which makes it a darling of small PR agencies and freelancers. The software can also be integrated with Slack, which is great for teams working on that platform.

However, it still has its challenges as reviewers report needing to weed through the mentions to narrow in on desired results. The product often picks up “spam” mentions, and companies with a common name may find search results are too broad. Some mentions do not come in in real-time like other products.

4. Brand24: Like other media monitoring tools, African PR professionals use Brand24 to track brand mentions online, measure the results of PR campaigns, analyze the target audience, and gather insights to improve PR strategy.

The biggest advantage of this tool is that it can categorize your brand/product mentions into positive, neutral, or negative sentiments, which will help you in analyzing your online reputation.

However, Brand24 does not track beyond social media conversations. It does not track traditional media sources like print magazines, which means you may miss some mentions of your brand in those channels.

5. SquirrelPR: SquirrelPR is one of Africa’s fast-rising media monitoring tools. Unlike other media monitoring tools mentioned above, SquirrelPR focuses only on African media and handles press distribution, maintains an accurate and dynamic media database of journalists in Africa, and allows PR pros to track news mentions through its intuitive monitoring technology.

SquirrelPR’s media monitoring tools come in two variants. The first called regular query allows clients to track news mentions across blogs, and social media of press releases sent via the platform. Therefore, it curates only keywords related to the headline of the press release and this could be exported into an Excel sheet for reporting.

Then there is the deep query feature, which allows clients to run track a journalist/media house’s coverage of a brand over a period. With this tool, you can gauge a media house or journalist’s depth of coverage as well as the sentiment of reporting.

Also through the deep query, a PR professional can track news mentions of a brand over a 10-year period. You can literally go back in time and see how much coverage a media house has provided for your brand.

However, it still has its limitation it is still light on social media tracking.