How to Create a Media Monitoring Analysis Report? [+Example]

6 min readJan 20, 2023

Here’s the problem with media monitoring and analysis: it can become a slow-moving giant. Let us explain.

In PR, there are hundreds of data from media monitoring platforms (media coverage, social mentions, news items, etc.) on your campaigns and clients that must be reported. However, making media reports manually and generating charts in Excel is a long process and takes too much of your time — and effort!

Don’t worry though, we have a simpler way of creating complete media monitoring and analytics reports.

Scroll down, we’ll show you how!

What is a Media Monitoring Report?

A media monitoring report is basically a comprehensive document that includes performance data, key statistics, news, and other important information on your brand’s offline and online presence.

In a few words, in such a report you can gather all intelligence and results of your brand’s media monitoring and analytics. Although, it’s not just a social media report.

There are many different, but equally important, aspects of media monitoring. Some examples are monitoring of traditional media (like TV), web mentions, broadcasts, and more.

Simply put, it’s a complete overview of your media mentions that helps protect your brand.

Why Media Monitoring Reports Are Important

Media monitoring analysis reports are a must in the PR and Communications world.

Interestingly, 45% of the PR professionals like you focus on media measurement and reporting.

With these reports, you can keep track of your PR KPIs to evaluate your strategy. Also, you can demonstrate your campaigns’ performance, prevent social media crisis escalation, and even stay on top of your competitors.

Let’s see some examples of how you can use media and monitoring analysis in your PR reports.

1- To Report Your PR Campaigns

Campaign reports are the greatest example of media monitoring analysis. It can showcase the performance of your digital PR campaigns. Such reports mostly contain media coverage, sentiment analysis, and positive and negative results. Also, you can include suggestions for improvements in similar upcoming campaigns.

2- To Keep Track of New Opportunities

Media monitoring analytics can help you be continuously aware of all new PR opportunities for your brand. For instance, you can track new and promising influencers on social media and reach out to them before your competitors. Moreover, you can spot any new trends, or even marketing and sales leads for your business development colleagues.

3- To Report any Ongoing Crisis

Unfortunately, as a PR professional, you have to deal with small or big brand reputation crises. A media monitoring and analysis report can play a key role in these circumstances. It explains how and why the crisis occurred and highlights the damage control tactics you followed. Furthermore, it gives insights into your previous PR efforts and what could have been done better.

4- To Report Competitor Analysis

Competitor analysis reports are very important to closely monitor your competition and keep up-to-date with their activities. So, media monitoring services are fundamental for conducting competitive analysis and seeing what they’re up to. These reports may also be handy for staying on top of industry news and business trends. Especially, if you include your indirect competition in the monitoring process.

Before jumping to how you can create a media monitoring report, we should first take a look at what data and information it should include. Keep reading!

What you should Include in a Media Monitoring Report

First of all, you should always have in mind the purpose of the report. Is it to monitor the effectiveness of a campaign or to analyze a crisis?

In any case, we have noted down some key data insights that can’t be missing from your media monitoring reports.

Total Mentions

To set the scene, you should definitely include an overall analysis of your web and social media mentions at the very beginning of your report. That way, you’ll paint a general picture in your audience’s mind.

Sentiment Analysis

Do people like and support your brand? Or do they complain about it?

A sentiment analysis of the overall online mentions can help the report’s recipients understand the people’s feelings toward your brand and PR efforts.

Media Share

Media share is crucial for PR reporting. It helps in identifying where all your mentions are coming from and what channels are performing better.

Geography

This is necessary, especially if you’re working for a well-known and international brand.

Knowing the geographical distribution of your mentions can help you boost your PR efforts in certain countries, or even determine where you need to invest more in localization.

Pro tip: In Mentionlytics, you can also see a world map with the exact number of mentions per country for a detail-oriented approach in your report.

Top Mentions

Surely, in an analysis report, you don’t have to include every social or web mention of your brand. PR clipping is not the case here.

However, you should highlight the ones that come from top mentioners, like highly-ranked websites or prestigious influencers.

Our advice: Include a small number of top mentions per channel. You’ll make your point, without info overload! Also, consider adding some kind of analysis of your top mentioners to be extra thorough.

That’s all the data insights we recommend you include in every media monitoring analysis report.

You can customize them to fit every report’s objective and they’re comprehensive, even for people outside the Communications world, e.g. senior executives.

How You Can Create a Media Monitoring Report

Here’s the juicy part. You can use online tools to generate the analyses and statistics we mentioned above. As a PR professional, you’re surely familiar with many social media monitoring tools.

After all, almost 50% of PR pros agree that “sourcing more coverage and producing measurable results are the top ways to increase value inside their organization”

So, what should you do?

First, find a media monitoring and social listening tool you can trust, like Mentionlytics. Then, sign up to create customized reports and have a free trial of the platform.

Navigate to the sidebar and find the Report Builder. And, ta-da!

You can build a fully tailor-made media monitoring analysis report, with automatically generated data insights that will inform — and impress — your clients and team!

Conclusion

Now, you know all the basics to start creating media monitoring analysis reports. Just keep in mind these simple tips:

Define the report’s objective first — campaign performance report, competition analysis report, etc;
Know your audience — the people that are going to read it;
Keep it simple and comprehensive — don’t overdo it with too much data.

Go and make some great media monitoring reports for your clients or your company!

Originally posted on Mentionlytics: https://www.mentionlytics.com/blog/media-monitoring-report