By understanding and tracking brand mentions and PR results, you can clearly see the difference between a thriving brand and one that’s struggling to capture attention.

TL;DR

Brand mentions are any instances where your company is referenced online—often without a backlink. They're key indicators of brand visibility, PR effectiveness, and share of voice. This guide breaks down what brand mentions are, why they matter, and how to track and leverage them to strengthen your PR strategy.

What are brand mentions? (definition & examples)

Brand mentions are cases when a specific brand is mentioned online, discussed, or referred to on any digital platform in various forms of communication. This could be on blogs, social media posts, news articles, or forums, just to name a few.

There are two types of mentions:

• Linked mentions, which include a hyperlink to your website
• Unlinked mentions, which reference your name without a link

Both are valuable for PR and reputation management. Even without links, mentions show that your brand is part of public conversations.

Examples of brand mentions:

• A news article covering your latest product launch
• A podcast host discussing your brand as a category example
• A Reddit post asking for opinions on your company
• A LinkedIn comment where someone tags your brand during an industry debate

Mentions can occur in three different types of sentiments: positive, neutral or negative. They are a key indicator of your brand's presence and reputation in the public sphere.

Why tracking brand mentions matters (for PR strategy & ROI)

For businesses across industries, brand mentions are a thermometer for the health of their brand. Through onlinementions, businesses can monitor their online reputation, their customers' opinions of them, and the effectiveness of their PR strategies.

Tracking brand mentions is the practice of setting up a filter and getting notifications every time someone uses your brand name or designated keywords. It sounds simple, but it's a tool that can super power your PR.

Here’s why tracking mentions matters:

• Understand brand visibility
  See how often your brand is discussed, where it's showing up, who’s talking about it, and how.
• Measure campaign impact
  Mentions help you gauge whether your press releases, announcements, or events are getting attention.
• Monitor reputation and sentiment
  Track the tone of mentions to identify positive buzz—or spot potential PR crises before they snowball.
• Improve media outreach
  Discover which outlets and journalists already cover your brand or topic area.
• Prove PR ROI to stakeholders
  Use mention volume, reach, and Share of Voice (SOV) data to show your team’s value.

Effectively monitoring and responding to brand mentions can enhance your brand image, boost customer engagement, and provide valuable insights into the public perception of your brand.

The different types of brand mentions

There are several different types of brand mentions, depending on the source the mention comes from:

A good brand mentions tool captures all of these mentions and groups them according to source and sentiment.

1. News mentions (earned media)
Articles in online media, industry publications, or local news outlets referencing your brand in coverage.

Example: A product launch mentioned in TechCrunch or a quote from your CEO in a trend piece.

2. Social Media Mentions (shared media)
Comments, posts, or tags on platforms like Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Instagram, or TikTok.

Example: A journalist tweeting a link to your press release or an influencer tagging your product in a post.

3. Blog and forum mentions
Mentions in niche blogs, customer review sites, or forums like Reddit or Quora.

Example: A blogger reviewing your product or users discussing your company in a Reddit thread.

4. Podcast and video mentions
Spoken mentions in audio or video content that reference your brand or product.

Example: A podcast host citing your brand as a case study or a YouTube creator discussing your campaign.

5. Unlinked mentions
Your brand is mentioned without a hyperlink. These are common—and valuable—even without direct SEO benefits.

Example: A journalist references your brand by name but doesn’t link to your site.

6. Reviews and testimonials (customer-driven mentions)

User-generated content on review platforms like Amazon, TripAdvisor, Yelp, G2, Capterra, or TrustRadius. These mentions can reflect satisfaction, dissatisfaction, or comparison with competitors—and they influence buying decisions and brand perception.

Example: A 5-star review on G2 praising your media monitoring features, or a Capterra comment noting ease of use compared to a competitor.

7. Broadcast Mentions (TV, radio, podcasts)

Mentions of your brand in traditional or digital audio/visual media. This includes TV news segments, radio interviews, and podcast discussions. These often require specialized media monitoring tools to detect but can significantly boost brand credibility.

Example: A PR segment on a morning news show featuring your CEO, or a podcast host referencing your brand during an industry conversation.

Pro tip: With Prowly, you can monitor all of these mentions in one place and get real-time alerts whenever and wherever your brand is talked about.

Why brand mentions matter

If you're wondering whether it’s worth the time and budget to monitor brand mentions, the answer is simple: it’s essential for protecting your brand image, building trust, and proving PR value. Here’s how tracking brand mentions across digital and traditional media channels benefits your PR strategy

1️⃣ Reputation management

Brand mentions can be both positive and negative. While many boost your brand reputation, others can damage it—especially if left unaddressed.

Using brand monitoring tools like Prowly, you can track online conversations, including social media posts and reviews, in real time. This helps you manage negative mentions and reinforce positive ones, creating a healthier brand image and public perception.

💡 Tip: If you want to make your PR strategy truly robust, read these articles to learn how to manage and protect your brand reputation.

2️⃣ Customer perception and trust

Brand mentions provide valuable insights into how customers perceive your business—without needing extensive research. By tracking mentions across social media platforms, blogs and review sites, you can better understand trust levels and customer sentiment. 

3️⃣ Social proof

Track mentions that showcase testimonials, quotes, videos, or articles about your brand—this is social proof in action. These organic endorsements shape public trust and influence purchase decisions.

By using brand mention tools, you can automatically dig up this proof and attach it to PR reports with metrics like reach, sentiment, and engagement.

4️⃣ Crisis management

Wondering how to spot a brewing crisis? Set up alerts to monitor brand mentions across the web. A spike in negative mentions or sudden surge in volume on specific social media accounts can signal reputational risks early on.

This allows you to take control of the narrative before the story spirals, protecting your brand reputation.

5️⃣ Competitor analysis

Brand monitoring isn’t just about you. Track how people talk about your competitors—what gets praised, what triggers backlash, and how audiences respond.

Using tools like Prowly, you can follow competitor social media channels, websites, and review platforms to identify patterns and gaps in their PR strategy.

P.S. For those searching for the best tools available for competitor analysis, check out this article.

6️⃣ Monitoring digital & traditional media mentions in one place

Collecting clippings manually is a daunting task, especially since most print media comes out with new issues every single day. That's when a media monitoring solution can take all the work off your hands.

With print monitoring you can:

• Instantly access global and local newspapers, magazines, and journals.
• Track brand mentions, competitors, and industry trends across all outlets.
• Analyze insights using a user-friendly dashboard.
• Ensure comprehensive coverage from diverse sources.
• Evaluate print media investments and campaign ROI with advanced filters.

💡 Want to make the most of your print coverage? Discover how to turn print media monitoring into a powerful part of your PR strategy.

Broadcast monitoring lets you better understand the media landscape by analyzing your media presence across TV, over the Radio, and in podcasts on both local and global scales.

Monitoring broadcasts allows you to:

• Gain comprehensive coverage data
• Track all mentions across the US, Canada, and the UK
• Capture relevant broadcast content for your market
• Get detailed insights on your media presence
• Obtain metrics like estimated reach, publicity value, and sentiment analysis
• Analyze all media sources from a single, unified tool

7️⃣ Industry trends

Brand names are not the only thing you can track with brand mentions software. You can also type in industry categories, product names, new technologies and anything else that comes to mind.

For example, if you want to keep up with the latest news about ChatGPT, you can just track the term and get notified when news and other mentions roll in.

You can also learn all about using social monitoring for PR from The Complete Social Media Listening Guide for Public Relations.

How to find and track brand mentions (free & pro tools)

Before investing in a dedicated platform, there are manual and free ways to begin brand monitoring. These options can help you start finding brand mentions and understand your brand’s online presence—though they’re limited in scale and insight.

Free & manual methods to find brand mentions

1. Manual search

Start with a basic Google search using your brand name, product names, or spokespersons. Try it in incognito mode and use tools like the Google’s “News” tab to focus on news sites only. You can also use filters to view recent results or limit them by region.

🔻 Limitation: You’ll miss mentions on social media platforms, forums, or in spoken formats like podcasts.

2. Google Alerts

Set up keyword-based alerts to monitor brand mentions from websites and indexed media. You’ll get email updates when those keywords appear.

🔻 Limitation: Doesn’t include social media channels, podcasts, or sentiment indicators.

→ Read more about Google Alerts alternatives in our article "The Best Google Alerts Alternatives for PR Pros."

3. Social media search

Use the built-in search features of social media platforms like Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram to manually check for mentions, hashtags, and tags.

🔻 Limitation: No unified view across channels. You’ll miss context, trends, and brand sentiment behind the mentions.

4. Review sites

Check platforms like G2, Capterra, TrustRadius, or TripAdvisor to monitor what customers are saying about your brand. These reviews can reveal both praise and negative mentions, shaping your brand reputation and trust.

🔻 Limitation: No automated alerting or way to track trends over time.

5. Forums & online communities

Search Reddit, Quora, or niche industry forums using Google with the site:operator (e.g., site:reddit.com “your brand”). These online conversations can uncover hidden insights about your audience and competitors.

🔻 Limitation: No sentiment analysis, limited visibility into volume and engagement levels.

Media monitoring tools (with Prowly walkthrough)

As your media presence grows, free methods become unsustainable. Media monitoring tools offer comprehensive, real-time coverage—and Prowly is built to meet your needs end-to-end.

What to look for in Brand Monitoring Tools

Effective brand monitoring tools should help you:

• Monitor brand mentions across all channels: news sites, blogs, podcasts, social media platforms, review sites, and broadcast media
• Detect brand sentiment and flag negative mentions using sentiment analysis
• Set up customized keyword alerts for your brand, competitors, or campaigns
• Consolidate mentions into a unified dashboard for analysis and reporting
• Track trends over time and measure your Share of Voice vs. competitors

Pros: fast, accurate, covers all types of sources: digital media (including social media) and traditional media (print & broadcast), lets you add mentions to PR reports with just a few clicks

Cons: free for seven days only

Tip: Read this full guide on brand monitoring software to choose the right one.

How to track mentions with Prowly

1. Set up your brand monitoring dashboard

Start by heading to your mention tracking dashboard. Enter the brand terms, campaign hashtags, or spokesperson names you want to monitor.

Customize your monitoring by:

• Language and region (e.g., only Japanese-language results)
• Type of media channel (e.g., social media, blogs, TV, forums)
• Choose specific journalists or authors

2. Create smart alerts that fit your workflow

Once your terms are set, configure email notifications to fit your team’s rhythm, like:

• Immediate alerts for spikes or negative sentiment
• Daily or weekly roundups for ongoing coverage and positive mentions
• Scheduled digests (daily, weekly, or custom intervals)

This way, your team never misses a beat—but also doesn’t get flooded.

3. Monitor sentiment & impact across all channels

Get a real-time view of:

• Audience sentiment and tone (positive, neutral, or negative)
• The volume and source of each mention
• What’s trending in customer feedback and user mentions

Use these insights to adjust your marketing strategy, manage your online reputation, and strengthen customer satisfaction.

4. Add print & broadcast mentions to your PR reports

Need to track mentions beyond digital? Prowly also helps you:

• Monitor print coverage from global and regional outlets
• Track broadcast media, including TV, radio, and podcasts
• Easily insert traditional media mentions into PR dashboards

These features are ideal for reporting on high-visibility campaigns or executive interviews.

Here are some examples of how traditional media mentions appear in your PR reports:

5. Generate custom PR reports in minutes

At the end of your reporting cycle, generate stunning, data-rich PR reports with just a few clicks. Customize layout, highlight key wins, and present clear insights your manager or clients will love.

🎯 No more screenshots or spreadsheets—just clean, credible data backed by real results.

Tips for tracking brand mentions

If you're new to tracking brand mentions, we have a few handy tips to help you get started.

📌 It's not just the brand name

Brand mention tools let you track literally any term you can think of. This means you can choose a wide variety of terms alongisde your brand name. For example:

• spokesperson names
• online authors
• authors you want to track online
• product names (e.g. "CRM software")
• category terms (e.g. "healthcare communications")

And all of this for yourself and for your competitors.

While your brand term should be the first thing to start with, don't limit yourself. Every brand mentions tracking tool comes with a number of keywords you can track by a specific plan, so make good use of those keywords.

📌 Analyze your sentiment on the fly

Great monitoring software like Prowly does more than just collect brand mentions. As each mention comes in, Prowly analyzes the context around it and sorts the mentions according to sentiment, organizing them into three groups:

• positive
• neutral
• negative

This lets you sort all of your brand mentions automatically using language learning algorithms. For example, if you see a large number of negative mentions coming in over a short period of time, this means that a crisis is looming and you need to look into it.

📌 Track variations of your brand name

If you assume that your (potential) customers know how to spell your brand name perfectly, you're wrong. Depending on what the brand name is, there could be many alternatives that people use. For example, you could search for "Mailchimp" or "mail chimp" with equal success. If you set up just one of these as a term to track, you could miss out on valuable mentions.

📌 Don’t underestimate print, TV or radio mentions

Although most of our information comes from online sources, print, TV, and radio remain crucial media types. They are often seen as more "prestigious" since earning mentions in these outlets is generally more challenging.

Conclusion

Tracking brand mentions is not an afterthought, it's a vital part of a great PR strategy. No matter what industry you're in, tracking brand mentions allow you to stay on top of reputation management, avert crises, and keep an eye on your competition.

And it doesn't have to cost an arm and a leg to get started, either. With Prowly, you can start monitoring the web for your branded (and other) terms today completely free for 7 days.

The post What Are Brand Mentions and How to Track & Analyze Them appeared first on Prowly.

The problem is that there are so many media measurement tools that it can feel hopeless just getting started. To help, we've collected over 30 traditional and digital media measurement tools which we've divided into seven categories.

From measuring website traffic to the success of your social media campaigns, we have something for everyone.

What are media measurement tools?

Media measurement tools help PR teams see what’s working and what’s not.

They track how your press coverage performs across channels, highlight the impact of your campaigns, and provide data to back up your results when reporting to clients or leadership.

Common features of media measurement tools:

• Media monitoring: Track brand mentions across news sites, blogs, TV, radio, and social media.
• Sentiment analysis: Flags whether coverage is positive, negative, or neutral. This audience measurement method is usually driven by AI.
• Share of voice reports: Compares your brand's performance and presence to competitors.
• Reach and impressions: Estimates how many people saw or could have seen your coverage.
• Coverage scoring: Rates each media hit based on relevance, reach, sentiment, or custom criteria.
• Campaign performance tracking: Groups media hits by campaign, user behavior, and more, and shows what got the most traction.
• Custom reports: Builds branded coverage reports you can send to stakeholders, e.g., key performance indicators relevant to your social media performance.
• Influencer and journalist tracking: Shows which contacts drive the most valuable media hits.
• Alerts and notifications: Sends real-time updates when your brand is mentioned.

What are marketing campaign measurement tools?

While media measurement tools focus on earned media and PR impact, such as coverage volume, sentiment, and share of voice, marketing campaign measurement tools are built to track performance across paid and owned channels. These include email campaigns, PPC ads, social media posts, and landing pages.

They help marketing teams understand which campaigns drive clicks, conversions, and revenue. For example, a marketing team might use these tools to see how many leads came from a paid LinkedIn campaign, which ad creatives performed best, or how email open rates varied across audience segments.

In short, media tools show your influence in the press, while marketing tools show your return from direct outreach and ad spending.

Traditional media measurement tools

These tools help you measure the effectiveness of traditional media channels, like TV and radio.

Nielsen Audio (formerly Arbitron)

Source type: Radio

Use case: Measures radio audience size, reach, and demographics to assess the impact of radio ads or mentions

Limitation: Does not capture streaming radio or podcasts accurately, and regional data can be limited

Circulation Figures

Source type: Print

Use case: Local newspapers or trade publications often publish their own distribution stats to support ad sales or sponsorship pitches

Limitation: These are often unaudited and self-reported, which may affect reliability

Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC)

Source type: Print

Use case: Verifies the print circulation numbers of newspapers and magazines, often used to estimate potential reach

Limitation: Measures distribution, not actual readership or engagement

BARB (Broadcasters' Audience Research Board)

Source type: Television (UK)

Use case: Tracks TV viewing figures in the UK, useful for evaluating brand mentions in TV news or talk shows

Limitation: Data is sampled from a small panel and may not reflect niche or regional programming

Traditional campaign & media measurement metrics

For traditional media formats, there are two main types of metrics you can track:

• Media impressions: the number of times a piece of content is viewed across different platforms.
• Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE): a metric that estimates the value of media coverage by comparing it to the cost of purchasing the same amount of ad space.

💡 Remember that although AVE is a traditional method, it’s not the best way to measure your PR tactics’ impact. In digital PR, there are many better ways to make data-driven decisions. Find out more in this article: What is Advertising Value Equivalency in PR? (+ AVE Alternatives)

PR campaign and digital media measurement tools

Before we dive deep into other measurement tools, just one quick note. We'll get into what you can measure with Prowly, as we have detailed information at our fingertips. We lack detailed testing data for all the other listed tools, but you can discover more by booking a call or utilizing a free trial where offered.

P.S. Here's a whole article about PR metrics that will show you what to measure exactly and why (with examples).

Prowly

Prowly is an all-in-one public relations software solution that uses AI to help small and medium PR agencies and in-house PR teams manage media relations, create press releases, pitch the right journalists, and monitor PR campaigns.

It offers PR CRM, pitching tools, a media database with over one million contacts, an AI Assistant, a press release creator, media monitoring tools, and a detailed PR reporting suite.

Prowly is best for agencies and in-house PR and marketing teams, especially small-to-medium-sized businesses, and any business that wants to gain valuable web or social media insights.

Pricing: starts at $258/mo billed annually, and a free trial is available

What metrics can you track with Prowly?

Share of Voice

Domain Authority

Domain authority, calculated by Semrush on a scale of 0 to 100, reflects a website's overall quality and SEO performance, with higher scores indicating stronger authority.

Backlinks

In Prowly’s PR Reports tool, you can track your PR success by comparing your number of backlinks through different periods, showing year-over-year growth, for example. Backlinks are counted automatically and you will see them in each project's main Media Monitoring dashboard.

Media tiers

Set up media tiers in Prowly based on the preferences of your target audience, not just visitor numbers. Track how often your brand is mentioned in Tier 1 outlets and monitor the number of press mentions in each tier to assess their value.

Top mentions

Prioritize top mentions from media outlets that best match your target audience, using filters like country and sentiment. In Prowly, you can generate and sort a list of top mentions by industry category and domain authority to effectively measure your PR activities.

Sentiment analysis

The solution uses algorithms and machine learning to perform sentiment analysis, which Prowly groups into easy-to-follow categories.

Data visualization

With Prowly, you can personalize your data visualization. You can export your data to Excel (.XLSX), Numbers (.CSV), or copy it into a PR report to easily share your outcomes with your clients or company.

Prezly

Prezly is a PR CRM for agencies and businesses that want to reach out to a large number of media professionals systematically.

It offers email outreach, sites and newsrooms, CRM for public relations, PR and media analytics, and linking coverage to the PR CRM for more valuable insights.

It is best suited for PR agencies.

Pricing: Prezly pricing starts at $90 per user, per month, billed annually, and has a free trial is available

Meltwater

Meltwater is a data analytics platform that gives insights into media, social, and consumer trends.

Its features include media intelligence, media relations, consumer intelligence, influencer marketing, and sales intelligence.

It is a best fit for agencies, so smaller PR teams are better off looking at Meltwater alternatives.

Pricing: It has not been disclosed publicly, but our research on Meltwater pricing shows it's around $6,000-10,000 per year. There is no information about a free trial, but you can book a demo.

Press clipping services

These services send you updates and summaries of content where your brand was published, both online and offline. It's a tool that has been around for a while and is available in Prowly too.

With Prowly you get press clippings and a host of other PR features with a flexible pricing plan and a free trial period.

Marketing campaign measurement tools

These digital analytics tools for marketing performance measurement give you insights about specific marketing channels.

Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a product and website analytics platform that helps you better understand your customers and how they behave in your app or website.

Features include website metric analysis, research validation, KPI monitoring, website and product performance reporting, and feedback collection.

It is best for product businesses and marketing teams.

Pricing: starts at $24 per month and there is no free trial.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free tool for measuring any aspect of your website's performance. GA shows everything from visitors to conversions and the performance of individual pages.

Features include website analytics, campaign performance tracking, conversion rate tracking, website visitor behavior tracking, and more.

It is ideal for any business with a website.

Pricing: This tool is free to use.

Meta (Facebook & Instagram) analytics

This tool helps you track the performance of your organic and paid media content on Meta's platforms.

It offers metrics and trends tracking, visual reports, ad performance overview, demographic reports and more.

It is a good fit for agencies, in-house marketing teams, and anyone with a business account on Meta.

Pricing: free to use

Adobe Analytics

Adobe Analytics is a web analytics platform that helps you track the customer journey across digital channels.

It offers website analytics, drag-and-drop segmentation, ad hoc analysis, page reports, mobile dashboards, cross-device analysis, and more.

It is best suited for business owners and agencies.

Pricing: not disclosed publicly, research shows that it starts at $2,000 per month and there is no free trial

Kissmetrics

Kissmetrics is an analytics tool for tracking human behavior on your website and removing bottlenecks to additional revenue.

It comes with real-time website metrics, tracking across websites and products, funnel tracking, and detailed customer activity monitoring.

It is a good choice for business owners and e-commerce stores.

Pricing: starts at $125.99 per month. A free trial is available, but only after a demo.

Social media monitoring tools

Social monitoring tools give you details on your brand's performance on social media channels.

Prowly

Prowly is a PR and media monitoring tool that gives real-time insights about your brand terms and target keywords.

Prowly offers real-time monitoring, keyword combinations, context, sentiment analysis, estimated mention reach, and region and language filtering.

It is a great choice for agencies, in-house PR and marketing teams, or anyone who wants a detailed and accurate social media report.

Pricing: starts at $258 per month, billed annually, with a free trial available for 7 days

Brand24

Brand24 is an AI-powered social media tracking and listening tool for marketers and brands.

It comes with competitive analysis, reputation management, hashtag analytics, PR measurement, white label reporting, and detailed analytics.

It is a solid choice for In-house teams, agencies, and freelancers.

Pricing: starts at $119 per month and a free trial is available for 14 days.

Talkwalker

Talkwalker by Hootsuite is a consumer intelligence platform that gives you detailed insights about your customers.

It comes with social listening, media monitoring, social benchmarking, audience insights, customer feedback analytics, social content ratings, and more.

It is best suited for larger in-house marketing teams and agencies.

Pricing: not publicly available and there is no free trial.

Brandwatch

BrandWatch is a consumer intelligence platform that helps businesses understand how customers interact with them across platforms.

It comes with content searching and segmentation, sentiment analysis, real-time consumer data access, and an AI-powered analytics search engine.

It is best suited for agencies and in-house teams of larger businesses.

Pricing: not publicly available and there is no free trial

Social media analytics tools

The best social media measurement tools reveal the performance of your social media channels through specific metrics.

Hootsuite analytics

Hootsuite is a free social media measurement tool that lets you measure performance through organic and paid social media channels from a single dashboard.

Features include publishing and scheduling, social media analytics, AI content creation, help figuring out the best time to post, social engagement tools, inbox and messaging tools, and more.

It is best for agencies, in-house teams, and freelance social media marketers who need marketing measurement tools.

Pricing: starts at $99 per month and a free trial is available for 30 days.

Sprout Social

SproutSocial is a social media management platform with analytics and monitoring capabilities.

Its features include social media engagement, publishing, social analytics, social listening, influencer marketing, and employee advocacy tools.

It's a great tool for agencies and internal marketing teams.

Pricing: starts at $199 per seat per month, billed annually, and a free trial is available for 30 days

Buffer Analyze

Buffer Analyze is a part of the Buffer suite of tools that helps you understand your social media platform performance.

Features include content idea libraries, scheduling, publishing, social analytics, a customized landing page creator, and an AI assistant.

It's a good choice for agencies, freelancers, and in-house marketers.

Pricing: starts at $6 per month per social media channel and a free trial is available for 14 days.

Keyhole

Keyhole is a full-stack social media tool that lets you manage your online presence, create and schedule posts, analyze their performance, and more.

Features include social media analytics, social listening, historical insights, publishing, and scheduling.

It is best for freelancers, in-house teams, and marketing and PR agencies.

Pricing: starts at $40.83 per month for the analytics suite and a free trial is available for 14 days

Rival IQ

Rival IQ is a tool for real-time social media analytics, reports, and real-time alerts.

Features include competitive analysis, channel social media analysis, social media audits, and social listening.

It's a great choice for agencies and in-house marketing teams.

Pricing: starts at $199 per month, billed annually, and a free trial is available

SEO tools

These tools help you uncover opportunities to upgrade your SEO performance and rank better with great content.

Moz

Moz is an SEO tool for monitoring your SEO performance and finding new ways to improve your rankings.

It comes with domain analysis, keyword explorer, link explorer, competitive research, backlink research, and reporting tools.

It's a good tool for agencies and in-house SEO teams.

Pricing: starts at $99 per month and a free trial is available for 30 days

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is an SEO tool that helps you create great content, do keyword and competitor research, and improve your search engine rankings.

Features include keyword research, competitor research, website analytics, backlink monitoring, site audits, and content explorer.

It's a great choice for agencies, in-house SEO teams, and freelancers.

Pricing: starts at $129 per user per month and there is no free trial.

Semrush

Semrush is an all-in-one SEO tool that helps you create better content and rule search engine results.

Top features include keyword research, competitor analysis, rank tracking, content creation and distribution, PPC keyword research, and many others.

It's a solid choice for agencies, in-house teams, and SEO freelancers.

Pricing: starts at $139.95 per month and a free trial is available for 7 days

P.S. If you’re searching for the best tools available for competitor analysis, check out this article.

Google Search Console

GSC is a tool for monitoring your presence in organic search results.

It offers page performance tracking, keyword rankings and monitoring, measuring impressions and clicks, and helps keep up with search performance trends over time.

It's a great tool for anyone who has a website. Coupled with Google Analytics, it covers your SEO basics.

Pricing: This tool is free to use.

P.S. If you want to dive deeper (not only) into PR metrics, check out this reach vs. impressions comparison.

Heatmaps

These tools analyze your website to reveal patterns in how visitors access them. The "hotter" the heatmap, the more visitors come to that part of your website.

Hotjar

Hotjar is a user experience and data analytics platform that shows you insights about how people access your website.

Its features include heatmaps, polls, feedback collection, video recording sessions, surveys and interviews.

It is a good tool for any marketing team or agency.

Pricing: starts at $32 per month and there is no free trial, but there is a forever-free plan

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is an analytics tool by Neil Patel that helps website owners understand the behavior of their visitors.

Features include heatmaps, visitor recordings, A/B testing, traffic analysis, error tracking, surveys, goals, and CTAs.

It is best for marketing teams.

Pricing: starts at $99 per month and a free trial is available for 30 days

Email analytics

These tools help you understand the performance of your email campaigns and key metrics such as CTRs, open rates, conversion rates, and more.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a popular email marketing tool that lets you build your email lists and create campaigns for different audiences.

It has a visual email builder, audience segmentation, detailed email analytics, a landing page builder, email personalization, and more.

It is best for small businesses, marketing teams, agencies and anyone who needs to send business emails.

Pricing: starts at $13 per month and there is a forever-free plan for up to 500 contacts

Get response

GetResponse is a marketing automation platform that lets you harness the power of emails combined with other marketing channels.

Its features include email marketing, SMS marketing, an AI email generator, website builder, landing pages, live chat, and much more.

It's a great choice for marketers, agencies, small and large businesses, and anyone serious about email marketing.

Pricing: starts at $15.58 per month and there is a 30-day free trial

Benefits of using media measurement tools

Besides getting a seat at the table and growing your budget for PR activities, digital and traditional media measurement tools have a number of benefits.

1. Track the real impact of press coverage

Instead of guessing how far your story reached, you can measure impressions, sentiment, and audience engagement. For example, if your product launch gets picked up by five outlets but only one drives traffic or engagement, you’ll know where to focus future outreach.

2. Prove ROI to clients or leadership

Clients often ask, “What did we get from this campaign?” Tools like Prowly let you generate reports showing how many people saw the coverage, the tone of any mentions, and whether your share of voice increased. It’s easier to justify continued investment when you have the numbers to back it up.

3. Spot issues early and act fast

If a negative story starts gaining traction, tools like Mention, Prowly or Brand24 can alert you in real time. That allows you to issue a response, correct misinformation, or brief spokespeople before things spiral.

4. Understand which messages actually resonate

Not every press release lands the way you intend. With sentiment analysis and engagement tracking, you can see which parts of your messaging stick. For example, if journalists keep quoting a specific stat or angle from your release, you’ll know to lead with that hook in future pitches.

Join 1,000+ businesses and start measuring your PR campaigns with Prowly.

Practical applications of media measurement tools

Now that you've seen the different tools for measuring the effectiveness of your PR and media strategies, let's show you how a few of them work in real life.

Prowly lets you track media coverage and analyze how your PR efforts land with journalists and the public. For example, after sending a press release through Prowly’s media database, you can monitor who picked it up, what the sentiment was, and how much reach it generated.

If your campaign gets coverage in multiple outlets, you can use Prowly’s reporting tools to group those mentions by campaign and instantly create a clean report to share with clients or leadership.

With Mention, you can stay on top of what people say about your brand across social platforms and news sites. You'll be alerted immediately if there’s a sudden spike in brand mentions. This helps with real-time crisis response or spotting organic buzz you might want to amplify with paid media.

While basic, Google Alerts still serves as a free way to track media mentions. If you're running a small campaign with limited resources, setting alerts for your brand name and campaign keywords can give you a low-maintenance way to stay in the loop without paying for full analytics.

Frequently asked questions

What are media measurement tools?

Media measurement tools are software solutions that track and analyze your brand's presence across various media channels. They help PR and marketing teams understand the effectiveness of their campaigns by providing insights into reach, engagement, sentiment, and more.

Why are media measurement tools important for PR professionals?

These tools let PR professionals quantify the impact of their efforts, demonstrate ROI to stakeholders, and refine strategies based on data-driven insights. By understanding what resonates with audiences, teams can make informed decisions to enhance future campaigns.

How frequently should I analyze media coverage?

Regular analysis is beneficial. Depending on the volume of media activity, weekly or monthly reviews can help you stay informed and make timely adjustments to strategies.

The post Best Media Measurement Tools for PR in 2025: 30+ Top Choices appeared first on Prowly.

A good PR strategy requires being a step ahead of your competitors. So this is why today we're giving you a full list of the very best tools for competitive analysis. Whether it's through social media, SEO, paid ads, or just their website, there's a competitor research tool for everything. 

Read on to discover how to keep your finger on the pulse thanks to the right competitor analysis tool.

What are competitive analysis tools?

Competitive analysis tools help you understand how your competitors are performing and how your industry is evolving. These tools support market research by revealing key metrics such as website traffic, content performance, keyword rankings, and audience engagement. By using competitive analysis software, you can benchmark your efforts, spot emerging trends, and make data-driven decisions to refine your content strategy and stay ahead in your market.

TL;DR: The best 18 competitor analysis tools

Here is the list of the best competitor research systems:

1. Prowly – All-in-one PR tool for media outreach, press release creation, and coverage tracking.
2. Brand24 – AI-powered media and social media monitoring tool.
3. BuzzSumo – Tool for analyzing content performance, finding influencers, and monitoring trending topics.
4. Prowly (Mention Tracking Focus) – Tracks press coverage, social, print, and broadcast mentions with crisis alerts.
5. Upfluence – Platform for identifying, managing, and paying social media influencers used by competitors.
6. Semrush – SEO tool for keyword tracking, backlink analysis, and competitive content research.
7. iSpionage – Tracks competitors' paid traffic, ad copy, and SEO keywords.
8. Boardfy – Pricing intelligence and dynamic pricing automation for e-commerce.
9. VidIQ – YouTube analytics tool for keyword tracking, video performance, and competitor benchmarking.
10. AdClarity – Insights into competitors’ display, video, and social ad campaigns.
11. Rival IQ – Social media competitive analysis software with engagement and content benchmarking.
12. Google Trends – Free tool to analyze search trend data over time and across regions.
13. Social Blade – Free social media analytics across marketing channels like YouTube, Instagram, and Twitch.
14. Similarweb – Web traffic and digital marketing intelligence platform for benchmarking.
15. Mailcharts – Competitor email and SMS marketing campaign monitoring tool.
16. Sparktoro – Audience intelligence platform for discovering where target audiences spend time online.
17. Moz – SEO software suite for keyword tracking, site audits, and backlink analysis.
18. Visualping – Tracks visual and content changes on competitor websites with alerts.

PR & media monitoring competitor analysis tools

Ideal for PR professionals tracking brand mentions, journalist outreach, and media coverage.

#1. Prowly: competitor analysis tool for coverage tracking, PR outreach

Pricing: Basic ($258/month), Pro ($416/month), Enterprise (custom pricing)

Best for: Best for: combining media outreach, press release distribution, and coverage tracking to gauge competitors' PR reach. Well suited for small to medium in-house PR teams and PR or marketing agencies.

What you can do with Prowly

Prowly is the best all-in-one PR tool for creating press releases and reaching out to journalists. Instead of spraying and praying, you can tap into Prowly's media database of over one million contacts.

With advanced filters, you can find journalists who talk about your industry and your competitors and pitch them a story to get the spotlight on your client or brand.

With features such as media monitoring (more on that later), you can find out what kind of reach your competitors' content is getting and learn what you can do better. With Prowly's AI backed PR software, anyone can create an effective press release, even with no public relations experience.

The top features include:

• AI PR software for creating press releases, emails, and tracking engagement
• Media database of over one million contacts
• Online newsroom
• PR reports
• Media pitching tool
• And much more

Pros:

• Comprehensive all-in-one PR tool: media database, press release distribution, media monitoring, reporting, and more
• Database of over one million journalist contacts with advanced search filters
• AI-powered press release creation and engagement analysis
• Transparent pricing and a 7-day free trial

Cons

• Entry-level pricing is relatively high (from $258 per month)
• Best suited for small and medium PR teams or agencies; may be too extensive for freelancers or very small businesses

Overall verdict

Prowly is a versatile PR tool, especially valuable for teams and agencies seeking a comprehensive solution for monitoring, media contacts, and PR analytics.

#2. Brand24: social listening tool for competitor insights

Pricing: Individual ($119/month), Team ($159/month), Pro ($239/month), Enterprise ($399/month)

Best for: AI social listening, getting access to media mentions across platforms such as web, socials, videos, podcasts and more.e.

What you can do with Brand24

Brand24 is the best-in-class brand mention monitoring tool. With access to over 25 million online sources, you can get an overview of your mentions and track them in real time. With features such as advanced sentiment analysis and detailed reporting, managers can have an overview of multiple competitors in one place. Great for in-house social media teams and marketing agencies.

Top features:

• Reach and sentiment analysis
• Personalized reports for in-house teams or clients
• AI-based recommendations for branding and marketing campaigns
• AI topic analysis
• PR metrics such as AVE and presence score

Pros

• Access to over 25 million online sources, real-time monitoring
• Advanced sentiment analysis and detailed reports
• AI-generated recommendations for branding and marketing campaigns

Cons

• Starts at $119 per month, which can be a barrier for micro-businesses
• Focuses mainly on social media and online monitoring with fewer traditional PR features

Overall verdict

Brand24 is a great tool for mention tracking and sentiment analysis, ideal for marketing and PR teams focused on social media and online presence. It is a great social media tracker.

#3. Rival IQ: social media marketing strategy support

Pricing: Drive ($239/month), Engage ($349/month), Engage Pro ($559/month)

Best for: Comparing competitor social media performance, delivering metrics on engagement, follower growth, and content strategies across platforms.

What you can do with Rival IQ

Rival IQ is a competitor tracking software exclusively for social media platforms. Simply add your own account and your competitors' info and you will get a quick rundown of where you're underperforming and what you could do better.

Key features include:

• Head-to-head social media account comparison
• Social media audits with customizable reports
• Social post analysis (top-performing content, hashtags, best time to post, Boolean keyword search and more)

Pros

• Rival IQ specializes in social media competitor analysis, tracking engagement, follower growth, and content performance

Cons

• Focused on social media platforms, so not suitable for SEO or content analysis
• Pricing may be high for small teams

Overall verdict

Rival IQ is a must-have for social media managers who want to benchmark their performance and content against direct competitors.

SEO & website traffic competitor analysis tools

For digital marketers focused on SEO, keyword gaps, and traffic benchmarking.

#4. BuzzSumo: tool for competitor analysis of content performance

Pricing: Content Creation ($199/month), PR & Comms ($299/month), Suite ($499/month), Enterprise ($999/month)

Best for: helping marketers and PR teams track competitor content performance, discover popular topics, and identify high-impact influencers.

What you can do with BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is an all-in-one tool for content creators. Whether you're a journalist or run a brand, you can use this tool to measure how your content performs in the real world. You can tap into new topics, identify popular content across the web and social media, monitor your brand mentions, find influencers and much more.

Top features include:

• Real-time trending topic research
• Easily find the most viral content
• Competitive benchmarking
• Competitor backlink analysis

Pros

• Content performance analytics, discovery of trending topics and influencers
• Brand mention monitoring and competitor backlink analysis
• Real-time trend tracking

Cons

• Higher pricing (from $199 per month)
• Primarily focused on content analysis, lacking broader PR or media monitoring features

Overall verdict

BuzzSumo is a great choice for content marketing analytics and trend research. It is recommended for marketers and PR professionals who want to provide competitor analysis for content, monitor Google search rankings, and have a search engine's rank tracker at hand.

#5. Semrush: website competitor analysis tool for SEO & keywords

Pricing: Pro ($139.95/month), Guru ($249.95/month), Enterprise (starts at $5,000/month)

Best for: identifying SEO and content gaps, showing keywords competitors rank for, provides content ideas and backlink opportunities.

What you can do with Semrush

Semrush is the all-in-one tool for SEO. Its competitor website analysis tool lets you see what keywords your competitors are ranking for, which pages are driving traffic, how many backlinks they have, and much more.

The top Semrush features are:

• Site audits
• Keyword research
• Content planning, creation, and optimization
• Backlink analysis and tracking
• Rank tracking

Pros

• Offers a comprehensive suite for SEO, including keyword research, backlink tracking, and site audits
• Helps identify what keywords and content competitors are ranking for, revealing valuable opportunities
• Includes detailed reporting and insights for both organic and paid search

Cons

• Pricing can be steep for small businesses or freelancers
• The wide range of features may be overwhelming for SEO newbies

Overall verdict

Semrush is an industry-leading choice for organizations that want to deeply understand and outperform their competitors in search results. It’s best suited for marketing teams or agencies with the time and resources to leverage its full capabilities. Semrush, as a keyword tool, supports you in analyzing traffic sources, outranking your content over competitors' websites, and boosting your blog posts in Google search.

Paid advertising & pricing intelligence competitor tools

For performance marketers tracking ads, budgets, and pricing strategies.

#6. iSpionage: competitor analysis software for paid ad strategies

Pricing: Starter ($59/month), Professional ($99/month), Advanced ($299/month), Enterprise (custom pricing)

Best for: tracking competitors' PPC campaigns, keywords, and ad copy to provide detailed insights into digital advertising strategies.

What you can do with iSpionage

You can see what your competitors are doing in the field of PPC and SEO. Find out what keywords they are targeting organically, which ones they are bidding for, plus the budget and creatives for each of them.

Top features include:

• Detailed competitor analysis
• PPC keywords and ad effectiveness index scoring
• SEO keywords, keyword groupings, and landing page snapshots

Pros

• Provides a snapshot of landing pages and campaign effectiveness

Cons

• Focused on paid search, so less useful if you want broader competitive insights
• Some features require higher-tier plans

Overall verdict

iSpionage is ideal for marketers who want to optimize their PPC campaigns by learning directly from their competitors’ advertising strategies.

#7. AdClarity: digital advertising & competitor campaign analysis

Pricing: not available publicly—you can only book a demo

Best for: detailed insights into competitors’ display, social, and video advertising campaigns, offering valuable data for benchmarking digital ad strategies.

What you can do with AdClarity

AdClarity is a digital ad intelligence platform that lets you compare your performance against competitors' paid ads. It covers everything from display ads, social media, video and in-app ads, programmatic vs. direct ads, and much more.

Some of the best features are:

• Explore competitors' ad activity across platforms from a single dashboard
• Data exports, APIs and custom dashboards
• 25 million human panellists that provide insights on paid ads

Pros:

• Delivers detailed insights into competitors’ digital advertising campaigns across display, social, and video
• Offers benchmarking and creative analysis for paid ads
• Useful for agencies and brands running large-scale campaigns

Cons:

• Pricing is not public and may be expensive
• Focused on advertising, so not a full competitor analysis solution

Overall verdict

AdClarity is a strong choice for businesses that want to benchmark their digital ad strategies against the competition and get creative inspiration.

#8. Boardfy: competitor pricing intelligence software

Pricing: starts at €39/month, depending on the number of products you want to track

Best for: tracking competitor pricing at a glance, making automated pricing changes, optimizing Google Shopping campaigns and more.

What you can do with Boardfy

Boardfy is built for e-commerce stores and brands that want to stay on top of pricing changes for their products all in one dashboard. Track thousands of products or competitors at a time and inform your sales and marketing strategies with real-time data.

Top features are:

• Competitor monitoring, pricing intelligence, feed optimizer, and dynamic pricing AI for e-commerce
• Monitoring distributors and MSRP variations for brands

Pros

• Designed for e-commerce, it tracks competitor pricing and helps you react to changes quickly
• Supports dynamic pricing and can monitor thousands of products at once

Cons

• Focused on pricing, so it won’t cover other marketing strategies
• Final price depends on the number of products tracked, which may add up for large inventories

Overall verdict

Boardfy is a must-have for e-commerce businesses that need to stay competitive on price and want automated tools to help manage pricing strategies.

Influencer & email marketing competitor analysis tools

For brand teams analyzing outreach effectiveness and email campaign performance.

#9. Upfluence: influencer discovery & competitor site analysis tool

Pricing: not available publicly, you have to talk to their sales to get pricing details

Best for: identifying influencers connected to competitor brands, helping PR and marketing teams pinpoint key voices in their industry.

What you can do with Upfluence

This tool allows you to find, manage, track and pay influencers all in one place. You can look into the influencers in your industry that your competitors are using, discover their rates, the performance of their content, and their typical requirements for collaboration. Having this competitor data in hand, you can see which influencers should be involved in your marketing efforts. 

Top features are:

• Finding influencers who already track and love your brand
• Detailed campaign metrics to help you pick and choose the best influencers with the highest ROI
• Managing, hiring and paying influencers directly through Upfluence
• Setting up affiliate campaigns

Pros

• Comprehensive influencer management: discovery, analytics, collaboration, and payments all in one platform
• Detailed influencer data, rates, and campaign effectiveness
• Affiliate campaign management capabilities

Cons

• No public pricing—requires contact with the sales team
• Mainly focused on influencer marketing with few PR or content features

Overall verdict

Upfluence is an advanced tool for businesses and agencies looking to professionally manage influencer collaborations and analyze competitor activity in this space. With this platform, you can gain competitor insights and learn from their lessons or make improvements when it comes to influencer marketing strategy.

#10. MailCharts: competitor analysis tool for email marketing campaigns

Pricing: starts from $149/month and offers a free plan.

Best for: monitoring competitor email strategies, design, and frequency, giving marketing teams insights for optimized email campaigns.

What you can do with MailCharts

Whether you're looking for inspiration for your campaigns or you want a sneak peek at competitors, MailCharts has all the data on email and SMS campaigns. You can conduct competitive research of this marketing channel and, based on the insights, make data-driven decisions.

From complete beginners to email pros, MailCharts gives you a full stack of tools to get started with your next campaign. 

You'll find features such as:

• Historical and competitive data for your industry
• MailCharts Index with 1,000+ brands and their email data
• Lifecycle campaign data for all companies in the database

Pros

• Analysis of competitors’ email campaigns: content, frequency, and design
• Email campaign inspiration and benchmarking
• Useful for e-commerce and marketing teams

Cons

• Limited to email monitoring—does not cover broader PR or social media
• Some advanced features are only available on higher-tier plans

Overall verdict

MailCharts is a niche but valuable tool for teams wanting to monitor and focus on their revenue growth from email marketing by learning from competitors.

YouTube & video content competitor tools

#11. VidIQ: competitor analysis tool for YouTube

Pricing: Boost ($16.58/month), Coaching ($99/month)

Best for: insights into YouTube video performance, including competitor keyword usage, engagement metrics, and content strategies for YouTube-specific growth.

What you can do with VidIQ

If you want to win with YouTube content, VidIQ gives you all the insights you need with their competitive tracking software designed solely for this platform.

Whether you want to do research and come up with new content ideas or find out what competitors are doing, VidIQ offers it all.

You can find features such as:

• Competitor channel analysis (highest viewed videos, views per hour, subscriber growth driven by premium content)
• Exporting top competitor keywords
• Sorting competitors by date, views per hour and other critical data points

Pros

• Tailored for YouTube, offering insights into competitor video performance, keywords, and engagement
• Helps you identify trending topics and optimize your own content

Cons

• Only works with YouTube, so not suitable for broader social or content analysis
• Some advanced features require a paid subscription

Overall verdict

VidIQ is perfect for creators and marketers focused on YouTube who want to understand what’s working for competitors and improve their own video strategy.

Free competitor analysis tools

Looking for a free plan? Here are several analysis tools that can not cost you a single penny.

#12. Google Trends: forecasting search trends and competitor signals

Pricing: free

Best for: real-time data on search trends, helping PR and marketing teams understand rising topics, forecast seasonal trends, and align content with audience interests.

What you can do with Google Trends

Google Trends is a completely free competitor analysis software that should be on everyone's radar. It displays the popularity of search queries over time and lets you see how popular a given term is in web searches.

Some of the many things this tool can do include:

• Showing search interests over time
• Comparing different terms and topics
• Showing regional interest
• Related topics and queries
• Real-time trends
• Seasonal insights

Pros

• Free tool for tracking search interest in topics and keywords over time
• Helps spot rising trends and compare popularity across regions
• Easy to use and accessible to everyone

Cons

• Limited to search trend data, so it doesn’t offer deeper competitive insights
• No direct competitor benchmarking features

Overall verdict

Google Trends is an essential, no-cost tool for anyone wanting to understand what’s trending in their industry and align content with audience interests.

#13. Sparktoro: social behavior & audience intelligence tool

Pricing: free

Best for: ideal for PR and marketing teams looking to identify audience behaviors and improve targeting strategies.

What you can do with Sparktoro

Instead of researching your competitors, Sparktoro researches your target market to find their preferences. If you struggle to determine why your audience behaves in a certain way or why your competitors perform the way they do, Sparktoro can provide many answers.

Key features include:

• Audience research: find the websites, social media accounts, podcasts, YouTube channels, etc., your audience engages with
• Keyword insights and demographic data

Pros

• Helps you discover podcasts, social accounts, and websites that matter to your target audience
• Useful for refining marketing and PR outreach

Cons

• Not a direct competitor analysis tool, it focuses more on audience behavior
• Some features are limited to paid plans

Overall verdict

Sparktoro is excellent for marketers who want to understand their audience’s habits and discover new channels for outreach, rather than just tracking their competitors’ actions.

For content creators benchmarking channels, engagement, and growth.

#14. Social Blade: social media metrics for competitor benchmarking

Pricing: free

Best for: Individuals and teams looking to monitor, compare, and analyze social media growth and engagement across platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Twitch, and more. Especially helpful for creators, agencies, and marketers who want quick insights into their own or competitors’ channel performance.

What Social Blade offers:

It provides a straightforward way to examine public statistics for a wide range of social media accounts. Users can instantly see up-to-date figures such as subscriber or follower counts, video view totals, and engagement rates.

Key features:

• Analytics for multiple platforms (YouTube, Instagram, Twitch, X, Facebook, and others)
• Channel and account comparison tools
• Historical growth tracking and future projections
• Publicly accessible data—no registration needed for basic use

Pros

• Free to use for most analytics and comparisons, you can see how much traffic competitors get
• Easy to get started—just enter a username to see results
• Covers a broad range of popular social platforms in one place
• Helps identify trends, monitor competitors, and discover influencers

Cons

• Limited to publicly available data; lacks deeper analytics or integration with other marketing tools
• Some advanced features require a paid upgrade
• Does not support PR outreach, media monitoring, or in-depth campaign reporting

Overall verdict

Social Blade is a practical, user-friendly resource for anyone who wants a quick snapshot of social media channel performance. While it doesn’t replace more comprehensive analytics or PR platforms, its accessibility and multi-platform support make it a useful addition for creators, marketers, and agencies interested in tracking growth and benchmarking against others in their industry.

#15. Similarweb: website competitor analysis tool for traffic & engagement metrics

Pricing: free

Best for: Entrepreneurs, marketing professionals, and businesses seeking detailed data on website traffic, audience behavior, and multi-channel digital marketing performance to benchmark competitors and understand market trends.

What Similarweb offers:

Similarweb is a digital intelligence platform that provides extensive insights into website performance, competitor strategies, and trends. It aggregates data from millions of websites and apps across more than 190 countries, delivering metrics such as traffic sources, user engagement, keyword rankings, and referral channels.

Key features include:

• Website traffic and audience behavior analysis
• Multi-channel marketing performance 
• Keyword research and competitive benchmarking
• Historical data and trend visualization
• Customizable dashboards and exportable reports
• API access and integration with other business tools

Pros

• Provides a broad and detailed view of competitors’ digital marketing strategies
• Covers multiple marketing channels in a single platform for holistic analysis
• Offers historical data for trend identification and forecasting
• User-friendly interface with clear visualizations and customizable reports

Cons

• Pricing can be high for startups and small businesses, especially for advanced plans
• Some data may be limited or less accurate for low-traffic or niche websites
• The platform’s extensive features may require time to learn and fully utilize

Overall verdict

Similarweb is a robust website competitor analysis tool designed for businesses seeking digital competitive intelligence across multiple channels. With insights into traffic sources, audience engagement, and competitor behavior, it's a go-to platform for marketing teams focused on optimizing online presence. While its pricing and learning curve may be a hurdle for smaller teams, its comprehensive data coverage and flexibility offer significant value for organizations committed to data-driven growth.

#16. Moz: SEO competitor analysis tool for keyword & link tracking

Pricing: free

Best for: small to medium businesses, SEO professionals

What Moz offers:

Moz is a well-established SEO software suite designed to help users improve search rankings, analyze competitors, and optimize website performance. It provides a range of features, including keyword research, backlink analysis, rank tracking, and competitive research.

Key features include:

• Keyword research (with AI-driven suggestions)
• Competitor domain and keyword analysis
• Site audits and page crawling to identify SEO issues
• Backlink tracking and analysis
• Scheduled and branded reporting

Pros

• User-friendly interface suitable for both beginners and experienced SEO professionals

Cons

• Lacks certain content marketing and link-building tools found in competitors like Semrush
• Local SEO support is limited to a few markets (US, UK, AU, CA)
• Does not support keyword clustering, which some competitors offer

Overall verdict

Moz Pro is a solid SEO platform offering a broad range of essential tools for keyword research, competitor analysis, and site optimization at a reasonable price point. It is particularly well-suited for small and medium businesses or marketing teams seeking an easy-to-use yet powerful SEO solution. 

#17. Visualping: competitor website analysis tool

Pricing: free

Best for: tracking visual and content changes on competitors' websites and sending alerts when updates occur. Useful for monitoring pricing, messaging, and new product announcements.

What you can do with Visualping

From small tweaks to major changes on landing and pricing pages, Visualping shoots you an update every time one of your competitors makes a change on their web presentation.

Expect features such as:

• Website change detection and real-time alerts
• Email alerts with screenshots of what changed

Pros

• Great for tracking pricing, product launches, or messaging updates
• Easy to set up with email alerts and browser extensions

Cons

• Only tracks website changes, so it won’t cover social, SEO, or content strategies
• May require manual setup for each page you want to monitor

Overall verdict

Visualping is a simple but effective tool for anyone who needs to stay updated on competitor website changes without manual tracking.

Competitor analysis tools: conclusion 

A competitor analysis tool can give you tons of helpful information without lifting a finger. In the age where a competitive research tool can do the heavy lifting for you, it simply makes no sense to do the manual research yourself.

This is where Prowly's competitive analysis software comes in. We monitor the web for mentions of your and your competitors' brands and target keywords, so you never miss a beat.

The post 17 Top Competitor Analysis Tools to Track Your Competition appeared first on Prowly.

The UK media landscape can be quite varied, with broadcast, print (often hidden behind paywalls), online, and social making for a colourful mix. The problem is that handling everything at once requires a comprehensive media monitoring solution that covers all media channels.

Luckily, we’ve compiled a list of the best media monitoring services for the UK market to help you track mentions, identify trends, and strengthen your earned media strategy. You’ll also learn which features are must-haves for UK-focused tools.

What is UK Media Monitoring?

Media monitoring in the United Kingdom is the systematic process of tracking and analysing print, online, social, and broadcast media to gather insights into how a business, organisation, or individual is represented across the UK media landscape.

How is media monitoring different in the UK?

The UK’s media mix—national press, tabloids, and regional outlets—is fast-moving. But print and broadcast are still leading. Surprised?

Here's the trick: many major outlets—like The Telegraph—restrict content and fall under the UK-specific NLA licence, which governs how print media is shared. That’s why it’s essential to use fully licensed monitoring tools.

So the first thing to look at when planning media monitoring strategy for UK market is–choose a service like Prowly, that tracks all formats, including paywalled print, online, social, and broadcast.

Top 5 media monitoring tools in the UK

We've reviewed the top five media monitoring tools for the UK market, along with their pricing and key features, so that you can find the best solution for your needs.

Note that, unfortunately, most tools do not offer transparent pricing—it’s usually necessary to get in touch with them to receive a custom quote.

UK Media Monitoring Services Overview

#1 Prowly

💸 Pricing: From £209 per month

Prowly is more than just a media monitoring tool—it’s your all-in-one digital PR platform for managing every stage of the PR workflow.

From media outreach and journalist discovery to monitoring coverage and tracking backlinks, it’s tailored for digital PR pros who want maximum impact with fewer tools.

Top features:

• Comprehensive media monitoring across online, print, broadcast, and social channels—helping you stay on top of your brand presence, wherever it appears.
• Backlink tracking so you can measure not just exposure, but also SEO value, by tracking articles that link to your target URLs. Build dashboards with backlink-rich mentions and sort them by domain authority using data backed by Semrush.
• Real-time alerts and sentiment analysis to keep you informed of media spikes and tone shifts.
• Advanced hashtag tracking—monitor #journorequest and other high-value hashtags with precise filters for topics like travel or finance.
• Audience & Traffic insights powered by Semrush, integrated into the Media Database—so you can target high-ranking media outlets based on relevancy, reach, and SEO value.
• Media Database with 1M+ journalist contacts, plus tools for email pitching, tagging, and campaign management.
• Custom dashboards and widgets to report on what matters most—mentions by country, domain rank, sentiment, or category (e.g. Advertising industry).

💡 No need to juggle multiple tools for backlinks, targeting, outreach, and reporting—Prowly brings it all together in one place.

#2 Roxhill

💸 Pricing: Custom pricing

Roxhill is a UK-focused media intelligence tool designed specifically for PR professionals who need deep insights into journalists and media outlets.

Media monitoring features include journalist profiles, real-time media alerts, advanced search filters, and email analytics. It also offers a comprehensive media database with direct journalist contact details.

Top features:

• Smart Folder Organization: Automatically categorizes media mentions into Smart Folders based on brand pillars, spokespeople, and themes. 
• Automated Metrics & Sentiment Analysis: Assigns sentiment, campaign themes, and other custom metrics to coverage, streamlining reporting processes. 
• Integrated PR Tools: Combines media monitoring with a comprehensive media database and outreach tools, enhancing the efficiency of PR campaigns.  

#3 Vuelio

💸 Pricing: Custom pricing

Vuelio is a comprehensive media monitoring and PR management tool that provides strong coverage of the UK media landscape.

Media monitoring features include real-time news tracking, social media listening, sentiment analysis, and broadcast monitoring. It also offers a robust media database with journalist and influencer contacts, press release distribution, and a built-in PR CRM.

Top features:

• Unlimited Keyword & Coverage Monitoring: Offers flat-fee plans with no limits on keywords or coverage, tracking across online, print, broadcast, and social media. 
• Integrated Media & Political Databases: Provides access to extensive media and political contact databases, facilitating targeted outreach. 
• Customizable Reporting Tools: Enables users to generate tailored reports and dashboards, enhancing the evaluation of PR efforts. 

#4 Meltwater

💸 Pricing: Custom pricing

Meltwater is a global media monitoring and intelligence tool that provides in-depth insights across news, social media, and broadcast channels.

Media monitoring features include real-time alerts, AI-driven sentiment analysis, social listening, and competitive benchmarking. It also offers a vast media database with journalist contacts, press release distribution, and advanced analytics to measure PR impact.

Top features:

• AI-Powered Monitoring with Mira: Utilizes AI assistant ‘Mira’ for real-time media monitoring and insights across various channels. 
• Comprehensive Media Intelligence: Covers over 270,000 online news sources, print publications, TV/radio broadcasts, and social media platforms. 
• Advanced Sentiment & Trend Analysis: Offers sophisticated tools for sentiment analysis and trend detection, aiding in strategic decision-making.

#5 Cision

💸 Pricing: Custom pricing

Cision is a leading media monitoring and PR platform in the US with extensive global coverage, offering powerful tools for tracking media impact and managing press outreach.

Media monitoring features include real-time news alerts, AI-powered sentiment analysis, social media tracking, and broadcast monitoring. It also has a vast media database with journalist contacts, press release distribution, and a PR CRM for campaign management.

Top features:

• Extensive Media Coverage: Monitors a vast array of sources, including print, broadcast, online, and social media, offering real-time tracking. 
• Cision Communications Cloud®: Combines media monitoring, database management, analytics, and social media distribution in one platform. 
• Advanced Analytics & Reporting: Delivers in-depth insights into media coverage, including sentiment analysis and share of voice metrics.  

12 features to look for in UK media monitoring services

If you're looking to monitor your brand's reputation online and aren't sure what to look for in a media tracking service (especially for the UK), here are some features to pay attention to when shopping around.

#1 Coverage

When we say "coverage," we mean two things.

One, the area it covers, as some tools focus on specific regions of the world. Furthermore, some services will be better at providing mentions from the UK, while others are focused more on the US market.

Two, coverage of available platforms, such as Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok, print and broadcast, and others.

💡 Ideally, you should choose a platform that provides access to your most important channels and regions for a holistic view of your brand presence.

#2 Content behind paywalls, NLA licence, and UK media coverage

Many UK media outlets – especially established print outlets like The Telegraph – limit online content access with subscription models. They are covered under the NLA licence (Newspaper Licensing Agency), which governs how copyrighted articles are shared.

This can pose a serious blind spot for brands, as influential stories or industry mentions may go unnoticed if your media monitoring tool doesn’t have licensing agreements in place.

And if you're working in the UK market one thing is sure–you’ll need access to this licensed press content.

Ideally, you should choose a platform that provides access to both mainstream and hard-to-reach sources, including those behind paywalls–like Prowly that supports NLA content for every Pro member.

💡 Prowly offers print monitoring powered by licensed content from 7,000+ outlets total, including national and regional UK press. Through its integration with LexisNexis, you get compliant access to premium print coverage—all in one place.

Whether it’s a feature in the national magazine or a niche mention in a local daily, Prowly helps you spot it, measure its value, and incorporate it into your reporting.

👉 Want to make the most of your print coverage? Discover how to turn print media monitoring into a powerful part of your PR strategy.

#3 Real-time alerts

When set up for the right keywords or hashtags, the real-time insights let you prevent minor problems from escalating into crises as well as find opportunities in your competitors' problems. You can find out if a major crisis is brewing not just around your brand, but also - your competitors.

Of course, you may also get daily, weekly or monthly summaries according to your needs.

👉 Strategy example: media monitoring for reactive PR

One of the most effective ways to practice reactive PR is by tapping into live journalist requests.

💡 Social media hashtags like #journorequest and #bloggerrequest are goldmines for spotting real-time media opportunities—and media monitoring tools help you to never miss a beat.

With Prowly, you can take this a step further by setting up precise hashtag filters for niche topics, like travel or finance. This way, you cut through the noise and only see the most relevant media requests for your brand or client.

Want to make it even easier?

Create email alerts based on these filters and get relevant requests delivered straight to your inbox.

💡 While alerts are often associated with crisis monitoring (such as spikes in negative mentions), you can also use them as your personal opportunity tracker—a kind of curated "newsletter" that helps you jump on journalist requests before anyone else.

#4 Sentiment analysis

When someone mentions you, it's pretty easy to tell how they feel about your brand at a glance. But you don't always have the time to spare it.

Choose a tool with sentiment analysis: the ability to automatically decipher how people perceive your brand.

This not only saves massive amounts of time but can also send you alerts when there is a sudden spike of negative mentions, which is a tell-tale sign of a crisis in making.

#5 Reporting and analytics

Good media monitoring tools let you create dashboards and reports with key metrics that are relevant to your client or business. You should get an overview of your mentions, the sentiment behind them, the total reach, share of voice, and other important PR metrics.

But it doesn’t end there.

For PR professionals who care about impact beyond exposure, tracking backlinks is crucial.

#6 Backlink tracking for smarter PR measurement

Backlinks in media coverage are more than just vanity metrics—they directly influence your SEO performance and domain authority. With backlink tracking, you can monitor not just how many articles mention your brand, but how many actually link back to your website or product page.

In Prowly, this is made simple. When building a monitoring query, you can specify your target URL—like your homepage or a specific landing page. This allows you to track only those mentions that include a backlink.

From there, you can analyse:

• The quantity and quality of those backlinks
• The domain authority of referring media outlets (powered by Semrush data)

For reporting, you can set up a dedicated dashboard that lists all articles with backlinks, filtered and sorted by key criteria—such as media category, country, or domain rank. This gives you a clear picture of which PR efforts drive real SEO value.

💡 If you're running a backlink acquisition campaign, use Prowly’s Media Database to group targets by audience demographics and traffic insights, assign tags to track progress, and monitor results directly in your custom dashboards. You’ll know exactly which media tiers are delivering valuable links—and which ones aren’t.

#7 Domain authority: The SEO twist to digital PR

Modern digital PR combines the storytelling power of traditional media outreach with an online spin that benefits search visibility.

One key performance indicator? The domain authority of the media outlets where your stories appear.

In Prowly, you can create widgets to display top-performing mentions based on the criteria that matter most to your strategy. For example:

• Show only mentions from high-authority domains
• Filter by country, estimated reach, or sentiment
• Highlight mentions from specific verticals—such as the Advertising industry—that offer the most value to your brand

How can you measure how well your PR campaign landed with high-quality, reputable outlets?

💡 You can simply generate a report that lists positive or neutral mentions, sorted by domain authority. This allows you to tie your PR success not just to visibility, but to the long-term SEO benefits it brings.

#8 Support and onboarding

Configuring queries can be time-consuming and complex, especially when aiming for precise results.

Hands-on onboarding assistance and quick access to a real person can make or break your experience. And when coverage is missed (because it happens), you'll want a reliable customer support team that doesn’t keep you waiting.

That's why the best media monitoring tools offer more than just software; they come with a knowledgeable and responsive support team to help you get the most out of the platform.

💡 Before choosing a tool, ask what’s included in onboarding, how support is handled, and whether it's part of basic pricing or an add-on.

#9 Custom query building

Whether you’re tracking a product launch or analysing competitor buzz, query flexibility is key.

Getting relevant results starts with setting up custom monitoring queries that go beyond basic keywords. A powerful media monitoring tool should let you fine-tune your searches with:

• Boolean operators
• Inclusion/exclusion filters
• URL tracking
• Domain rank prioritisation
• Language or region-specific parameters

This helps you focus on what really matters, avoid irrelevant noise, and tailor your monitoring to specific campaigns, verticals, or target audiences.

#10 Organizing and working with mentions

Monitoring hundreds of mentions is one thing. Making sense of them is another. Look for tools that help you organize and prioritize your results so you don’t get overwhelmed.

In Prowly, you can:

• Assign Tiers to mentions based on media outlet value
• Mark key mentions as Favourites
• Add Tags for campaigns, clients, or sentiment
• Filter mentions by region, category, domain authority, and more

This structure allows you to quickly zero in on what’s important and create segmented reports that actually tell a story—perfect for multi-client agencies or brands juggling many campaigns.

#11 Ease of use (User experience)

Don’t overlook the day-to-day usability of the platform, because media monitoring is a task you and your team will be doing daily. If the interface is clunky, slow, or hard to navigate, adoption suffers and so does your ROI.

Choose a tool with a clean, intuitive UX that’s easy to learn with thoughtful design choices that support productivity. A well-designed dashboard, drag-and-drop functionality, and clearly labelled filters can cut hours from your reporting and daily workflows.

💡 Always take the free trial. If it feels frustrating to use within the first hour, it’s not the one.

#12 Pricing structure and hidden costs

Media monitoring pricing can be tricky. Some tools offer a low starting price—but only for a limited set of features. Others might charge extra for:

• Additional users
• Backlink or sentiment data
• Media database access
• Mentions volume
• Premium support or onboarding

💡 Before committing, ask what’s included in the base price, what add-ons are charged separately, and how flexible the pricing is as your needs grow. Also, check whether NLA-licensed content (for UK coverage) is included or requires an extra fee.

Transparency in pricing = fewer surprises down the line.

Tips for effective media monitoring in the UK

Once you have your tool for media monitoring, it's important to know that just having the right toolset is not quite enough. Here are some tips to ensure you get the best value from media monitoring software.

Set up relevant keywords

Besides your brand name, make sure to cover relevant keywords around your product.

For example, if you represent a shoe brand, you'll wish to track your brand name and keywords such as "running shoes," "outdoor footwear," "lightweight shoes," and others that are relevant for your target audience.

Monitor regional and national press

To understand the bigger picture, monitor the entire UK media landscape, but don't forget to include regional papers and press.

Track your competitors

Add your competitors' brand names to the mix so you can stay on top of their online presence. Thanks to real-time mentions, you can track an ongoing crisis that you can use to your advantage.

Track TV and radio mentions

While online media monitoring should be your primary concern, the UK still has strong TV and radio landscapes that are worth dedicating time and attention to.

Analyze sentiment regularly

Great media monitoring software does sentiment analysis by default for each mention. As these analyses come in, monitor for major trends and changes to see how your target audience perceives you.

Regularly review data and adjust strategies

Based on the metrics in your dashboards, you may adjust your public relations strategy. For example, a great response to a particular campaign can be a sign to continue with similar messaging and platform placement.

Time to get moving

The UK is a unique market for media monitoring because traditional press and TV are very much alive and play a pivotal role in public perception.

While monitoring online sources is a great start, it often won't be enough to give you a clear overview of how your target audience perceives your brand.

A good media monitoring tool does all of the heavy lifting while you analyze and interpret your results, allowing you to adjust your strategy on the go.

With Prowly, you get all the features needed to monitor your online and offline presence, build relationships with journalists, and create and send great press releases all in one place.

The post Top 5 Media Monitoring Services & Tools in The UK (2025 Guide) appeared first on Prowly.

Unfortunately, Meltwater pricing is impossible to find on their website. Based on research and user reviews, though, we estimated its cost.

Given that you're Googling their pricing, you probably want to buy a powerful PR software platform without straining your budget. Naturally, we want to help you find the answer to your question and introduce Prowly as a smart alternative. Ready when you are.

Meltwater pricing

Based on our research, Meltwater costs an average of $15,000 to $20,000 per year.

Unfortunately, Meltwater pricing is not publicly disclosed, and potential customers must talk to sales to get a custom quote.

Key takeaways:

• For a basic, 1-user subscription, expect to pay around $7,000 per year and up.
• The average subscription costs around $15,000/yr to $20,000/yr, while enterprise plans can cost $40,000/yr or more!
• Meltwater offers three distinct plans—Essentials, Suite, and Enterprise.
• You can only access Meltwater with an annual contract; monthly subscriptions are unavailable.
• More affordable alternatives, like Prowly, start at $258/per month.

How we found this data

To get accurate information about Meltwater pricing, we searched the Internet to find what real Meltwater users were saying about their monthly costs.

Here's what people are saying in 2025:

One user, expressing their frustration, mentioned that Meltwater and Cision cost around $15,000 to $20,000. And if you're looking for enterprise reports, be prepared to pay up to $100,000!

Another user claimed she pays $13k per year and that she had her plan auto-renewed despite not planning to.

User #3 claims to pay $16,000 per year for reporting and insights.

Another user mentions paying only $6,900 per year, and using it only for media monitoring—possibly why the price is so low.

A different commenter claims paying $43,000 per year, mentioning that the price seems to be too much.

Many users have reported being able to negotiate prices with Meltwater or similar tools that don't offer transparent pricing.

Finally, user #6 mentions paying $33,000 per year for 20 users.

Ultimately, with Meltwater's custom pricing, the cost can depend on the specific features required, the number of users, and simply how well you negotiate your final price.

Plans explained

Meltwater’s pricing plans are designed to accommodate a variety of business needs, offering flexible options that scale as your media monitoring and PR efforts grow.

Here’s an overview of the different pricing tiers:

1. Essentials plan
   Perfect for smaller teams or businesses just starting with media intelligence. The Essentials plan gives you access to basic media monitoring tools, allowing you to track your brand’s mentions and stay informed about industry trends without the complexity of advanced features.
2. Suite plan
   The Suite plan is designed for businesses that need more advanced monitoring and analysis. In addition to comprehensive media coverage, this plan includes Meltwater's powerful social media management tools, allowing you to track social mentions, engage with audiences, and analyze performance across social platforms. It’s ideal for growing teams that want to consolidate their media and social media efforts onto one platform.
3. Enterprise plan
   For large organizations or agencies, the Enterprise plan offers a fully customizable suite of tools, designed to handle high volumes of data and provide enterprise-level insights. With tailored solutions and priority support, it’s perfect for teams that need the full power of Meltwater’s platform to scale their PR efforts globally.

Meltwater also provides tailored pricing for businesses with unique needs. To get a precise quote and find a plan that best fits your goals, it’s best to reach out to their sales team directly. And don't forget to negotiate!

Meltwater alternatives

Tired of searching for Meltwater monthly pricing and want a tool that shows you how much it costs right on their website?

Keeping your options open is always a great idea, and here are some Meltwater alternatives you should consider for PR.

→ If you want to learn more about other PR tools' pricing, feature sets, pros, and cons, you can check out these guides:

• Top 5 Meltwater alternatives
• Muck Rack pricing and alternatives
• Cision pricing and alternatives
• Roxhill pricing and alternatives
• Prezly pricing and alternatives
• Agility PR alternatives
• Propel alternatives
• Vuelio pricing
• JustReachOut pricing

How does Meltwater compare to Prowly?

The main contrast is in the pricing plans. Prowly offers flexible pricing options suitable for any organization size, making it a great choice if you're looking for affordable PR software without compromising on features.

Media database

Both providers offer high-quality media databases with contacts from local and international media sources.

If you're only interested in finding a media database, check out our guide on picking the best one for PR.

With Prowly, you can access more than 1 million contacts; Meltwater has about 400 thousand.

The distinctive factors among various media databases are their contact quantity, update frequency, and pricing. But it's crucial to consider not just the quantity but also the quality of media contacts. This can vary based on the location and beat you're interested in. This can especially be the case outside of the US, where the relevance of contacts may vary. 

To determine which option best suits you, ask for a sample or sign up for a free trial.

With Prowly, you get a free 7-day trial with full search access.

It's unclear if Meltwater offers a free trial. Although its product pages suggest you can find out more during a demo call, it's not clear if this will give you a complete view of its contacts.

Media monitoring 

Meltwater and Prowly provide essential media monitoring tools for tracking news and online mentions. They also include social media listening features.

Here’s a list of the best social media listening tools to choose from.

Print and broadcast monitoring in Meltwater and Prowly

Both Meltwater and Prowly offer robust tools for monitoring print and broadcast media, allowing you to track mentions across a wide range of platforms:

• Meltwater provides comprehensive coverage for print and broadcast media, including access to national and global newspapers, trade publications, and television or radio mentions. With Meltwater, you can track and analyze print articles, broadcast clips, and digital content, providing valuable insights into your brand's media presence across multiple channels.
• Prowly, on the other hand, focuses on delivering detailed print and broadcast monitoring by integrating with services like LexisNexis and TVEyes. This allows users to access mentions in print media, even paywalled content, as well as real-time tracking of TV and radio broadcasts. Prowly also offers the ability to filter data based on outlet categories, sentiment, and reach, ensuring that you have the most relevant insights at your fingertips.

Both platforms offer powerful monitoring tools, but Prowly’s integration with LexisNexis and TVEyes enhances its ability to provide in-depth, global coverage for print and broadcast media.
→ Read more here on print media monitoring and broadcast monitoring.

PR reports 

Both platforms provide PR reporting tools, streamlining the creation process for PR reports.

However, user reviews on G2 indicate that Prowly has slightly better results in measurements, monitoring data, and the transformation of media monitoring into visually appealing PR reports.

The availability of a free trial for Meltwater remains uncertain, making it challenging to assess their PR report creation functionality. However, with Prowly, you can use the 7-day trial period to explore and create your PR reports.

Additional features

Meltwater doesn’t provide a press release creator or online newsroom, which are valuable for businesses of any size. 

On the other hand, Prowly offers an AI-based press release creator, empowering PR professionals to input essential information and generate a polished press release within moments, requiring only minor editing.

Prowly provides an online newsroom, offering a centralized space to showcase key information for your company and clients. This feature facilitates easy access for journalists and media members when covering stories related to your brand.

Conclusion

Meltwater offers a rich feature set for media professionals, whether in an agency setting or as part of a business's PR team. Unfortunately, without transparent pricing, it’s hard to evaluate if you're on a budget or just trying to compare it to the alternatives, as you have to sit through lengthy sales calls to discover the pricing for your use case.

Prowly offers a media database, press release creator, and media monitoring that lets you manage all aspects of your PR strategy in one place. Its pricing is transparent and easy to understand.

We hope this comparison has answered some of your inquiries and simplified your decision-making process regarding selecting appropriate PR software.

If you're ready to begin evaluating PR platforms, you can explore Prowly for a full 7 days at no cost. No credit card information is needed, and there are no strings attached.

The post Meltwater Pricing—How Much Does Meltwater Cost in 2025? appeared first on Prowly.

But here’s the thing: you’re not just watching from the sidelines. You’ve got the tools, the access, and the voice to step in and handle it. Whether it’s a negative comment gaining traction or a bigger issue bubbling up, there is a way to take control.

This is what social media crisis management is all about and this guide will show you how to stay prepared, respond smartly, and bounce back stronger.

What is a social media crisis?

A social media crisis occurs when a brand receives negative attention online which then spreads rapidly. Social media crises typically happen on platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, and similar ones.

Every social media crisis has one thing in common: they incur lots of damage in a short time period, all thanks to the fast-paced nature of social media as a communications channel.

But how do you know if you're dealing with a proper social media crisis instead of a regular Tuesday morning of unhappy customers?

Here's a side-by-side comparison of a regular problem (e.g., a few negative comments) vs. a full blown crisis.

When a crisis strikes, you'll need a crisis management tool to help you determine and mitigate damage. This is where platforms such as Prowly help, providing media management tools to spot problems early on.

Why social media matters in crisis management

Social media has the power to either calm the storm or make it worse. It all comes down to how you use it: work it into your crisis plan and it can make life easier—or ignore it, and risk turning a small issue into a big mess.

Platforms like Twitter (X), TikTok, and Instagram act as accelerators in a crisis. A single tweet, video, or comment can:

• Go viral within minutes, reaching millions before your team has even drafted the first response.
• Shape public opinion instantly, often before full context is available, potentially leading to massive reputation damage.
• Attract media attention, as journalists now source breaking stories from viral posts.

Here are some examples where the social media manager acted too late, wreaking havoc on the brand's reputation:

1️⃣ OceanGate’s Titan sub disaster (2023)

When the sub went missing, TikTok and X were flooded with memes, theories, and panic. OceanGate failed to update in real time, letting misinformation dominate the narrative.

Here is a part of Guillermo Söhnlein's (co-founder and former CEO of OceanGate, Inc.) publication "OceanGate & Titan - Lessons Learned in Crisis Communications":

2️⃣ Airbnb hidden camera accusations

Multiple TikTok posts about hidden cameras in rentals went viral, but Airbnb didn’t respond until traditional media picked it up, losing control of the story.

3️⃣ Volkswagen’s prank ad gone wrong

A fake kidnapping teaser video sparked outrage on Instagram. VW deleted it too late and screenshots kept circulating, making matters worse.

P.S. Here’s an article that might come in handy if you’re looking for a tool to measure the impact of your communication efforts.

Crisis management strategy: key pillars

To do social media crisis management well, you need a plan and a strategy. Each crisis management plan will be different depending on your audience, the social media guidelines for a specific platform, the amount of potential damage, etc.

However, these are the main pillars of every good social media crisis management strategy:

#1 Preparation

The best time to prepare for a crisis is before it happens. Having a plan in place helps your team stay calm and act fast.

Key steps

• Assign roles: Who monitors social media? Are we using any tools to track negative publicity? Who approves responses? Who contacts legal? Clear ownership speeds up reaction time and helps you mitigate damage.
• Prewrite holding statements: Draft templates for common issues (e.g., data breach, service outages, public backlash, or something specific to your industry/service/product).
• Conduct simulations: Run mock drills with different scenarios to test your plan and response time.

Why it matters: Confusion costs you in the first 30 minutes of a social media crisis. Clarity and coordination win trust with your target audience and the press.

#2 Monitoring

You can’t manage what you don’t see. Active social media monitoring lets you spot emerging issues and trends before they explode.

What to monitor:

• Brand mentions and hashtags
• Sentiment shifts (positive → negative)
• Influencer or media activity
• Customer DMs and replies

Why it matters: A single tweet or video can go viral in minutes. Early detection gives you a chance to get ahead of the story.

#3 Communication

When a crisis breaks, your communication must be cohesive and trustworthy, both externally and internally.

Best practices:

• Align internal and external messaging: Everyone from customer support to leadership should know what’s being said and how to say it.
• Respond quickly and humanely: Don’t hide behind PR jargon. Acknowledge the issue and show empathy.
• Stay visible: Use your main social accounts to update regularly, even if you’re still investigating.

Why it matters: Silence looks suspicious. Consistent messaging builds credibility and diffuses confusion.

#4 Recovery

Once the crisis subsides, the real work begins, as you begin restoring your brand’s reputation and preventing future issues.

Post-crisis checklist:

• Conduct a debrief: What worked? What didn’t? Where were the bottlenecks?
• Engage your audience again: Be transparent about what you’ve learned and how you’re fixing things in the future.
• Rebuild goodwill: Launch campaigns that refocus on customer value and trust.

Why it matters: Brands that bounce back strongest are the ones that take accountability and evolve from the experience.

💡 Prowly tip

Prowly can support your crisis response across all four pillars:

• Preparation: Use Prowly’s media contact database to build press lists for crisis-specific outreach, so you can contact the right people to rebuild trust fast.
• Monitoring: Track brand mentions and earned media coverage in real time with Prowly’s media monitoring features.
• Communication: Distribute press releases directly to journalists, influencers, and stakeholders through Prowly’s newsroom.
• Recovery: Analyze coverage and sentiment post-crisis to understand how your message was received and where to improve.

Crisis management plan for social media

A solid crisis plan gives your social team structure and speed when everything feels chaotic. Here’s what it should cover:

Internal roles and escalation paths

Define who’s responsible for what. Assign a crisis lead, social media monitor, content drafter, and legal/comms approver. Include an escalation path. Who gets notified and when? Clarity here saves critical minutes and prevents even bigger problems.

Holding statements

Prewrite flexible, situation-agnostic messages for common crises (outages, data breaches, backlash). These allow you to acknowledge the issue quickly while you gather more info. Adapt them for Twitter (X), Instagram, LinkedIn, and the press.

Approval workflows

List who must review and approve messaging before it goes live. Include time limits (e.g., 15-minute response window) and backup contacts in case key people are unavailable. Speed is everything.

Response playbooks

Document step-by-step actions for different scenarios, like negative media coverage, customer injury claims, or viral complaints. Include:

• Platform-specific tone guidance
• Sample replies
• Decision trees (when to respond vs. when to stay silent)

Enhancing prevention: account security + internal comms

You can prevent most social media crises simply by doing your homework and staying prepared.

1. Keep your accounts secure. Create unique passwords for every social media platform, change them regularly, and use two-factor authentication to stay safe. Determine different access levels for each team member.
2. Regularly review scheduled content. Make sure that the content that is just about to go live doesn't interfere with the "hot" debates going on at the moment of pushing the content out.
3. Include internal messaging as the first step in the response. Keep everyone on the same page within your team before going public with any kind of response.

Here's a mini checklist to keep you prepared for all situations:

Social media crisis management checklist

Real-world social media crisis examples

(Un)fortunately, examples of crises happening on your social media platform are very common.

The great news is that you can learn a lot from their mistakes so you can prepare a better crisis response for yourself in the future.

#1 KFC's UK chicken shortage fiasco

In 2018, KFC UK temporarily closed over 600 restaurants after switching to a new logistics provider (DHL), which failed to deliver chicken on time.

Customers flooded social media with complaints and jokes. KFC responded with humor. Most notably, there was a full-page ad showing an empty bucket rebranded as “FCK,” earning public sympathy for its honest and transparent response.

How Prowly could have helped:

• Media monitoring would have allowed KFC to detect rising sentiment shifts and trending keywords like “chicken shortage” or “DHL fail” in real-time.
• Using press release tools, the PR team could have issued proactive statements to explain the issue early and maintain control over the narrative.
• With media contact management, they could’ve quickly reached key journalists to frame the story positively before it spun out of control.

#2 United Airlines passenger dragging incident

In 2017, a passenger was forcibly removed from an overbooked United Airlines flight.

A video of the incident went viral, sparking outrage. United's initial response was defensive, calling the passenger “disruptive,” which only worsened public perception. Eventually, they apologized, but the delayed and tone-deaf reaction caused lasting damage.

How Prowly could have helped:

• Crisis monitoring would have flagged the viral spread of the video immediately, before the backlash peaked.
• Using automated alerts, United’s PR team could have been notified about trending content involving the brand.
• Media sentiment tracking would have shown the overwhelmingly negative tone, nudging leadership toward a more empathetic and timely response.
• Press room features could help publish updates and apologies faster.

#3 Balenciaga's controversial ad campaign

In late 2022, Balenciaga faced severe backlash for an ad campaign featuring children holding teddy bears in bondage gear.

The imagery sparked accusations of exploiting children and promoting inappropriate themes. The brand was slow to respond and their initial statement blaming other parties made things worse.

How Prowly could have helped:

• Pre-campaign media intelligence tools could have flagged risky themes or similar controversies in the media space so they could have smelled trouble from a mile away.
• Media monitoring would’ve picked up on early criticism before it snowballed into a full-blown crisis.
• Crisis communication tools would have supported faster internal alignment and timely responses, helping the company resolve issues before they got to the press or relevant influencers.
• Prowly's influencer and journalist database could have helped Balenciaga engage voices of trust to clarify intent and shift the conversation.

Best practices in social media crisis communication

When you're preparing your crisis response team and overall strategy, there are a few things you can implement that are universal across industries and clients.

👉 Pause automated posts

When trouble is brewing, the last thing you want to do is create scheduled posts promoting your latest product or post photos from your Christmas office party.

When the first signs of a crisis show up, stop all scheduled and automated posts until the crisis is resolved.

👉 Respond quickly and consistently

One of the easiest ways to ruin your company's reputation is to not respond to negative comments or to do so when it's too late. Respond promptly across your social media accounts and reassure customers and bystanders that everything is going according to plan.

👉 Be human and transparent

Don't try to sugar coat a crisis by pretending it's not happening or responding to everything except the issue at hand. Recognize your mistake and own up to it; you'll have to do that sooner or later. The sooner you do it, the better for your crisis management team and company.

👉 Monitor sentiment and adapt messaging accordingly

Base your response strategy on the sentiment of the mentions that come in for your brand. For example, if the majority of mentions across social media posts are negative, it means you should spend more time addressing concerns. And when the sentiment switches to positive, you can adjust the content to suit your social media strategy.

PS. you can use Prowly as your PR coverage tool during a crisis to make educated decisions in real-time. Prowly sends you relevant mentions and performs sentiment analysis, helping you spot spikes in negative sentiment or any major changes with ease.

Tools for managing a social media crisis

Managing crises can be done manually, but why bother when there are so many tools to help you get results more quickly and easily?

Prowly – best for PR-focused crisis management

If you work in PR, Prowly is your crisis HQ. It provides everything you need to communicate quickly and effectively during a social media emergency.

• Quick press release distribution: Share updates instantly via your newsroom or directly with journalists.
• Custom media lists: Build and segment outreach lists for urgent, targeted communication.
• Media monitoring: Track brand mentions and earned media coverage in real time.
• Journalist engagement insights: See who’s opened your emails and what’s getting attention.

Prowly helps you stay in control of the story when it matters most—getting your side out fast and to the right people.

Brand24 – best for real-time social listening

Brand24 keeps its finger on the pulse of the internet. It monitors social media, forums, blogs, and news sites to alert you when your brand is mentioned, especially when sentiment turns negative.

You can get real-time alerts for keyword spikes, influencer mentions, and trending hashtags. It’s particularly useful in the early stages of a crisis, when a single post or video might start picking up steam.

While it’s not a PR tool, Brand24 is excellent at spotting a storm before it hits, giving you time to react and prepare messaging.

Conclusion

To get out of a social media crisis unharmed, you need to do just a few things well. Plan ahead for uncertainties, act fast when a crisis happens, and communicate clearly about what happened. Everything else is a walk in the park.

Don't take crisis management for granted. Build a crisis management strategy and document it. As time goes by and social media platforms change, refine your strategy on the go.

Last but not least, use tools such as Prowly to monitor your social media and get quantitative data on crises as they unfold.

The post Social Media Crisis Management: How-to Guide for 2025 appeared first on Prowly.

• Idea generation
• Press release creation
• PR research
• PR reporting
• PR media monitoring

There are certain potential risks to these tools, such as accuracy and privacy concerns. However, AI tools for PR can help you save time, brainstorm and share ideas, nurture relationships with media contacts, and much more.

The best AI tools for public relations professionals in 2025

Here are some of our favorite AI tools for PR professionals, with their top features, pricing, and pros and cons. We've grouped them based on their primary purpose for AI in public relations.

AI tools for content creation

These AI powered PR tools can help you with AI generated content, some of them specifically for PR, while others have more general use cases.

#1. Prowly

Price: starts at $258 per month; free trial available

Prowly's AI-enhanced workflow covers all aspects of press releases, from ideation to drafting, editing, journalist outreach, and email summarization.

✅ Pros

1. Spark your storytelling and ideation with Prowly’s AI writing Assistant✨. Say goodbye to blank pages. Simply input your general press release idea, and you will receive three story angles to develop as you wish.

2. Once drafted, Prowly’s AI Assistant provides suggestions for perfecting your freshly crafted press release. Adjust the tone, quotes, and text length to reflect your brand's style and goals even better.

3. Prowly's AI workflow simplifies pitching by using press release keywords to connect you with relevant journalists — who are genuinely interested in your story! — expanding your contact list.

4. Finally, Prowly offers personalized recommendations for your email's subject line, body, and preview text that align with your press release—designed to boost your email open rates and clicks significantly.

🔻 Cons

As for the downsides, we'd love to hear from you! Feel free to test our new AI workflow and share your feedback. We can guarantee you won't find anything this powerful on the market. Happy testing! ✨

Psst! We also prepared two guides to help you use the AI Press Release Generator for the best results and write and pitch press releases with AI.

#2. ChatGPT

Price: Free; ChatGPT Plus is $25 per month

✅ Pros

ChatGPT is one of the most popular AI tools for communication. The most advanced chatbot on the market uses a natural language processing model to answer your questions. ChatGPT can be used for almost anything, so it's no wonder it's one of the most common AI-powered recommendation engines.

PR professionals are using ChatGPT to streamline their workflow. They use it to craft press releases, generate creative ideas, conduct research, and compose pitches and follow-up emails.

One crucial aspect is effectively prompting the AI, and we have already addressed this topic in a recent article, in which we listed the top ChatGPT prompts for PR.

🔻 Cons

ChatGPT is not an AI tool designed for PR and it is far from perfect. And if you add content to the tool, you're practically giving away your data, because OpenAI uses it for learning. In other words, it's not smart to feed sensitive info to this tool.

The tool's knowledge base was cut off in January 2023. As the PR industry relies on timely information, this can be a significant issue.

Also, crafting a press release with ChatGPT can be challenging. Start by providing a prompt like "compose a press release about X, including key messages about A, B, C, and a quote from a company representative." 

The next steps depend on the outcome and require careful editing and attention to detail. ChatGPT is not a text editor, so it's not ideal for editing, cutting, or changing specific parts.

It works well for social media posts, where you can see the full content at a glance, but with longer texts, you may find it challenging to keep track of changes. You may often end up copying and pasting between multiple applications and windows.

#3. Jasper

Price: starts at $39 per month, free trial available

✅ Pros

Before ChatGPT became a thing, Jasper was the main AI-powered enterprise platform on the market. If you need anything written (including PR content), Jasper can handle it. Whether you want help with a new PR blog, a press release, or some social media copy, give it instructions, and Jasper will deliver.

In fact, Jasper can do routine tasks and handle your entire PR workflow. Simply upload the creative brief and the app can handle the rest. You can launch an entire integrated marketing campaign directly from Jasper.

🔻 Cons

On the other hand, Jasper has a high price tag compared to other AI tools for PR. It's also not great for long-form content and may need a lot of input to produce usable content.

If you're looking for top AI marketing tools, check out the 31 options we have prepared.

#4. Grammarly

Price: free for up to 100 prompts, then starts from $12

✅ Pros

Famous for its writing assistant, Grammarly launched its AI tool and followed the pack. Named GrammarlyGO, this app helps you improve your writing and adjust the content you create with one click. For example, you can ask the tool to shorten or summarize your text to make it more (or less) formal and much more.

GrammarlyGO helps you change the content you wrote and adjust it to a different tone of voice, style, and level of formality. For PR practitioners, you get a second pair of eyes to review your documents and press releases. Also, you'll never run out of ideas for your target audience.

🔻 Cons

GrammarlyGO suffers from the same problems as other AI tools for PR. The data may not be very accurate. Also, be careful when feeding it sensitive and important information, as the app uses your data for learning.

#5. Wordtune

Price: free plan available; plans start at $6.99/month

✅ Pros

This AI software has been around for a bit and many professionals, including those in the public relations industry, use it. It's pretty simple: you write something and Wordtune can improve it. If you ever get stuck while writing press releases, Wordtune can help you regain clarity.

You can ask this tool to insert a statistical fact, make a joke, or explain a complex term. If your content sounds unclear, you can ask Wordtune to simplify or summarize it.

🔻 Cons

On the downside, 10 rewrites per day in the free version won't last you very long. Also, compared to other AI tools for PR, the interface is not the greatest and comes with a steep learning curve.

#6. Claude

Price: Free plan available; Pro starts at $20/month

Claude is an AI assistant developed by Anthropic that excels at writing, editing, summarizing, and understanding context-rich conversations. It’s particularly useful for PR professionals looking to draft press releases, polish messaging, or brainstorm campaign ideas with a more thoughtful and conversational AI.

✅ Pros

Claude is great for long-form content generation and editing, but it may take some tweaks to do short copy well. It's really good at understanding context and many content creators prefer it to ChatGPT for this reason.

It can be super useful for brainstorming pitches, refining messaging and preparing Q&As.

🔻 Cons

Compared to more specialized AI PR tools, it has a limited number of integrations. Also, every now and then, it can produce outdated or generalized responses.

AI tools for visual content creation

If you need a graphic for a press release or a pitch, you can use these visual content creation tools to whip one up with a quick prompt.

#7. Midjourney

Price: starts at $8 per month

✅ Pros

A new tool that has gained popularity in the past year is Midjourney, a powerful image generator. Leveraging AI has become even easier with this tool, as you can put in any kind of prompt and have a fully finished image in minutes. 

For example, if you need an image for a PR campaign but don't want to hire a photographer, you can use Midjourney instead.

You might want to include some other images in addition to the regular boilerplate images and logos, and here is where Midjourney can help. It's cheap, effective, and can save you time.

🔻 Cons

Conversely, every image you create is fed back into Midjourney. This essentially means you do not own the copyright to your work. Even worse, other Midjourney users can see and use your content. 

Your images become public domain, and you no longer have the option of deleting them. In other words, it is one of the most common dangers of using AI tools.

#8. Canva

Price: free, paid plans start at $119.99 per year

✅ Pros

One of the most popular ways to create free content online is with Canva. This design tool has many features that allow anyone to become a designer, even without design skills. Their AI tool goes one step further. Simply type in the text for an image you want to create and Canva will deliver.

How does this come in handy for public relations? Let's say you want an image of a businessperson winning a marathon while wearing a full suit. Type it into the AI image generator and Canva will create it. It works similarly to other AI-powered tools: the better you create prompts, the better the results you can get.

🔻 Cons

As for the cons, there are only 50 images you can create with the free plan. Also, you may have copyright issues depending on your location.

#9. Synthesia

Price: starts at $18 per month

✅ Pros

Synthesia is AI-based video creation software that lets you type a prompt and create a video. PR pros can use it to turn any idea into a promotional video. Don't have the time to record a spokesperson making an announcement? Synthesia to the rescue.

This AI tool offers 140+ avatars that look and sound like real people. With 120+ languages available, it shows the future of the media landscape.

🔻 Cons

On the other hand, the video content created in Synthesia still doesn't have the look and feel of a real, recorded video. And the Personal plan limits the number of videos and scenes you create.

#10. Beautiful.ai

Price: $12 per month; free trial available

✅ Pros

Do you need to create a pitch deck or any presentation? You can use PowerPoint or Google Slides, but who has time for that when you have an AI tool? Beautiful.ai, to be more precise. This tool helps you create presentations by prompting you about the content you want included on the slides.

Unlike PowerPoint or Slides, Beautiful.ai is easy to use and works with you. You can change the content with a few clicks, whether you prompt the tool or add your own content.

🔻 Cons

Users complain about the UX and the app breaking down with more complex operations.

AI tools for meeting summarization and transcription

You can use generative AI to quickly turn an audio or video recording into a transcript you can use for a press release, blog post, pitch, or something else.

#11. Otter

Price: has free Basic plan, Pro starts at $8.33 per user per month

✅ Pros

To reach a press release, PR specialists have to sift through a lot of content. Sometimes, that content comes from meetings. The more meetings there are, the more difficult it becomes to create content for PR campaigns. This is where AI PR tools like Otter come in.

This AI tool tunes into your meetings (on Zoom, Google Meet, and other platforms) and "listens" to them. Otter then takes notes using its proprietary AI technology. In short, it transcribes the meeting as it happens in real-time. It identifies who spoke at which time and which sentences they uttered.

But even more than that, this AI-powered tool summarizes the meeting notes for you in real time and after the meeting. Instead of listening to hours of meetings, PR practitioners can just read a neat summary by Otter.

🔻 Cons

Otter is not always particularly accurate. Before creating press releases, you must remove quite a few "umms" from the written content. Also, it's not very affordable compared to other AI tools for PR. Luckily for you, we have more tools coming for comparison.

#12. Fireflies.ai

Price: Free plan available; premium plans start at $10 per user/month

Fireflies.ai is an AI-powered meeting assistant that records, transcribes, and summarizes meetings across various video conferencing platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. PR professionals can focus on the conversation without worrying about note-taking, ensuring that no critical information is missed during press briefings, interviews, or internal meetings.

✅ Pros

Fireflies does automatic transcriptions and summarizes meetings for PR pros without lifting a finger. It integrates with popular conferencing tools such as Zoom and Google Meet and it allows you to quickly search transcripts to find relevant information.

🔻 Cons

When the audio quality drops, so will the quality of transcripts. You'll need excellent recordings for transcripts that require minimal edits. For the more advanced features, you're going to need a paid plan.

#13. Descript

Price: Free plan available; paid plans start at $12 per user/month

Descript is an all-in-one audio and video editing tool that allows users to edit recordings like a text document. It’s perfect for PR teams producing polished interviews, podcasts, and videos for their next PR campaign without the need for advanced technical skills.

✅ Pros

• User-friendly interface with text-based editing
• Features like Overdub for voice cloning and filler word removal
• Collaborative tools for team projects

🔻 Cons

• Learning curve for advanced features
• High-quality exports may require higher-tier plans

AI tools for writing

#14. Semrush

Price: Free

✅ Pros 

Semrush offers various AI tools you can use to create, rephrase, and improve text for various purposes. 

It's a great option if you have occasional content writing and editing needs. 

For example, you can use them to summarize press releases or white papers, improve your own writing, or create content from scratch. The free tools suite includes:

• Paraphrasing tool
• AI Text Generator
• Proofreader
• Word Counter
• Title Generator
• Summary Generator

🔻 Cons 

While the tools are forever-free, you need to register to bypass usage limits. 

They are also limited to specific use cases like rewriting text or creating headlines, meaning you'll need to switch between different free tools.

AI tools for research and competitive intelligence

Need to find information on a topic and get up to date? These tools are excellent for analyzing data and giving you relevant insights for press conferences, pitches or any type of content you may need for PR.

#15. Perplexity.ai

Price: Free to use

Perplexity.ai is an AI-powered search engine that delivers direct, cited answers to complex queries. It’s a valuable research companion for PR professionals who need quick answers, background info, or competitor insights when drafting press materials or preparing for interviews.

✅ Pros

Perplexity is famous for its ability to deliver accurate, sourced responses. It is very useful for quick research and fact-checking, too. And the intuitive interface comes in handy.

🔻 Cons

Despite all the positives, this tool is not ideal for conducting in-depth research, and it offers limited control over how queries are filtered and refined.

#16. SurferSEO

Price: Plans start at $49 per month

SurferSEO is a content optimization tool that helps teams create SEO-friendly articles, press releases, and web content. It analyzes top-ranking pages and offers clear suggestions on keywords, structure, and readability to boost visibility.

✅ Pros

This tool's strengths lie in its real-time SEO guidance, easy integration with platforms like WordPress, and in-depth SERP analysis that helps teams stay competitive. And you can simply hook it up with Google Docs if you're not a fan of the SurferSEO interface.

🔻 Cons

On the flip side, SurferSEO assumes a basic understanding of SEO and can feel overwhelming to new users due to the volume of data it provides. You'll need the basic understanding of content optimization to use this tool effectively.

AI tools for media monitoring and insights

These tools let PR teams do social media automation so they can get a quick glance of their brand performance across socials and the web.

#17. Cision

Price: Custom pricing based on services selected

Cision is a full-suite PR platform offering media monitoring, journalist outreach, and press release services. It’s widely used by PR teams who need to manage large-scale campaigns and measure media impact.

✅ Pros

There are numerous benefits in Cision, including its massive journalist database, robust campaign analytics, and the convenience of built-in press release publishing.

🔻 Cons

Cision's cost may be too high for smaller teams, and the interface can feel complex and require onboarding or training.

#18. Meltwater

Price: Custom pricing based on services selected

Meltwater provides advanced media intelligence and social listening features. It enables PR professionals to track brand mentions, do sentiment analysis, and discover emerging topics across news outlets, blogs, and social media.

✅ Pros

Its key strengths include broad media monitoring capabilities, AI-driven insights for spotting trends, and the flexibility of customizable reporting dashboards.

🔻 Cons

The main drawbacks are the relatively high cost, which may be restrictive for smaller teams, and a moderate learning curve for some of the platform's more advanced tools.

Conclusion

AI tools for PR won't replace PR teams, but they can be incredibly helpful. Instead of thinking about AI communication tools as your enemy, embrace them and use them to streamline your workflow and make your job as a PR professional easier.

Ready to take that first step? Start with Prowly and sign up for your free trial today!

The post 18 Best AI Tools for Public Relations in 2025 appeared first on Prowly.

But just like beauty pageants have talent shows, interviews, and on-stage introductions, communication can be measured too. All it takes is the right tool for the job.

Today, we explore the top communication measurement platforms for PR professionals.

What is communication measurement?

Communication measurement is the process of tracking and measuring how effective your communication efforts are, internally and externally. Its purpose is to determine if the right messages are reaching the right people and achieving the desired impact, such as increased brand awareness.

With public relations becoming increasingly data-driven, communication measurement is becoming essential for teams that want to identify the best avenues to invest their time and money.

In this guide, we'll show you the best communication assessment tools, how to choose the right one, and highlight the most important PR-focused communication metrics.

Top communication measurement tools by category

First, let’s break down communication tools by their most important categories. Choosing the right tool is essential once you're clear on your communication approach.

And in just a few minutes, we’ll also walk you through which metrics you should be tracking to measure success.

External/PR-focused tools

These tools measure how well you interact with your customers across different channels. They're excellent for qualitative and quantitative measurement.

#1 Prowly – Best for PR teams focused on comprehensive media comms measurement

Prowly is a modern PR software platform that helps communications professionals manage media relationships, send out press releases, and track their impact.

The media monitoring capabilities enable you to track brand mentions across online media outlets, blogs, and news sources, with real-time alerts to keep your team up to date.

Press release analytics show exactly who opened, clicked, and engaged with your pitch, while the built-in journalist CRM makes it easy to manage outreach without losing context. For reporting, Prowly offers clean, customizable dashboards that visualize media pickup volume, sentiment, and message pull-through.

Key measurement features:

• Media monitoring with sentiment analysis
• Press release performance tracking (opens, clicks, coverage)
• Journalist engagement analytics and CRM tracking
• Campaign reporting dashboards
• Message consistency checks through coverage analysis
• Monitoring of online and offline (print and broadcast) mentions

Why it stands out:

Prowly is useful for small and mid-sized PR teams who want enterprise-style tracking and media database access without the heavy cost or complexity. It blends outreach and measurement seamlessly into one interface.

#2 Meltwater – Best for media intelligence and social listening

Meltwater offers a powerful suite of tools for tracking brand mentions across news, blogs, and social platforms.

It’s particularly strong in real-time monitoring and sentiment analysis, helping teams understand how their brand is perceived globally. PR and marketing teams can also measure share of voice, compare competitor visibility, and identify key influencers in their space.

Key measurement features:

• Omnichannel media and social monitoring
• Automated sentiment tracking
• Influencer discovery and analytics
• Share of voice and competitive benchmarking
• Customizable media impact reports

💸 Check this article to find out more about Meltwater's pricing.

#3 Cision – Best for enterprise PR teams

Cision is a long-standing leader in PR software for large organizations with global communication needs. It has a vast global media database, advanced campaign reporting, and powerful press distribution network.

Teams can track the reach, impressions, and tone of coverage across channels and assess how effectively core messages are being picked up.

Key measurement features:

• Global media outreach analytics
• Message pull-through and coverage tone analysis
• Journalist interaction tracking
• Campaign ROI dashboards
• Benchmarking against industry peers

💸 Check this article to find out more about Cision's pricing.

#4 Brandwatch – Best for brand perception and sentiment tracking

Brandwatch is a social and media listening platform built for brands that need deep insight into how they’re perceived online.

It analyzes conversations across news sites, forums, social media, and reviews, with a strong focus on consumer sentiment, emerging trends, and crisis detection. While not PR-specific, it's a valuable tool for teams monitoring public opinion at scale.

Key measurement features:

• AI-powered sentiment and trend analysis
• Social and media listening
• Influencer and topic tracking
• Brand health scorecards
• Visual dashboards for executive reporting

Internal communication tools

These tools help you measure how well you communicate with your team. They can help you improve engagement, collaboration and productivity.

SnapComms – Best for targeted employee messaging and urgent alert measurement

SnapComms is a dedicated internal communication platform built for sending high-impact messages that get seen.

It supports desktop and mobile notifications, digital signage, and even lock-screen alerts, making it especially effective for organizations with dispersed or frontline teams. SnapComms focuses on message delivery analytics and communicators, tracking open rates, providing read confirmations, and measuring employee engagement with every message.

Key measurement features:

• Real-time message open and read tracking
• Targeted delivery by audience segment
• Acknowledgment and compliance confirmation
• Click-through and action rate monitoring
• Campaign-level reporting for internal comms performance

LumApps – Best for enterprise intranets with analytics

LumApps is a social intranet platform built for large, distributed workforces that need a unified internal communication hub.

It offers detailed intranet analytics, allowing teams to measure content reach, employee engagement, and behavior trends across the organization. LumApps also includes built-in survey tools and integrates with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, making it easy to embed communications into daily workflows.

Key measurement features:

• Page and content view tracking
• User engagement and retention analytics
• Audience segmentation and insights
• Internal surveys and feedback tracking
• Dashboard reporting for leadership visibility

Staffbase – Best for mobile-first internal campaigns and feedback

Staffbase is a mobile-friendly internal communication platform focused on employee engagement and campaign management.

It lets teams create branded internal news feeds, push notifications, and feedback tools. Measurement is baked into every campaign, allowing comms teams to track opens, reactions, survey responses, and content performance over time.

Key measurement features:

• Campaign performance metrics
• Survey results and participation rates
• Content engagement tracking (likes, views, comments)
• Targeted communication delivery and insights
• Exportable reports for leadership and HR

Workvivo – best for tracking social-style engagement and sentiment

Workvivo blends internal communication with a social media-style experience, encouraging employees to react, comment, and engage with content across the platform.

This makes it particularly effective at capturing organic engagement metrics, like likes and comments, as well as structured pulse survey feedback. Teams can analyze platform usage trends to understand how communication is landing across departments and regions.

Key measurement features:

• Pulse survey participation and sentiment scores
• Reactions, likes, and social engagement
• Content performance dashboards
• Employee shout-outs and recognition tracking
• Usage and adoption analytics by team/location

Hybrid tools (internal + external capabilities)

Some tools can do both at the same time, measuring both internal and external communication. They're jacks of all trades, but masters of none. However, they can be very useful for the right business settings.

SurveyMonkey – Best for capturing internal feedback and external sentiment at scale

SurveyMonkey is a versatile survey platform used by organizations to gather structured feedback from both employees and external audiences.

It excels at scalable data collection, making it ideal for running internal engagement surveys, pulse checks, and broader brand perception studies. For internal comms teams, it provides sentiment analysis, response tracking, and customizable question logic to dig into what employees think and why.

Key measurement features:

• Employee engagement and pulse surveys
• Sentiment analysis and text response categorization
• Benchmarked templates for internal and external research
• Real-time result dashboards
• CSV and API data exports for deeper reporting

Zoho Survey – Best for cross-departmental feedback and analysis

Zoho Survey offers a lightweight but powerful toolkit for gathering input from employees, customers, or any stakeholder group.

Its strength lies in its multichannel distribution, allowing surveys to be shared via email, social media, web embeds, or internal links. The platform’s reporting dashboards help teams track response rates, visualize patterns, and drill down by department or audience segment, making it useful for both internal comms tracking and public sentiment collection.

Key measurement features:

• Cross-department and multi-language surveys
• Customizable questions with logic branching
• Distribution via multiple internal or external channels
• Real-time reports and filters
• Integration with Zoho tools and external CRMs

Microsoft Viva – Best for internal analytics within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem

Microsoft Viva is an employee experience platform built directly into Microsoft 365, offering deep internal communication analytics based on employee interactions across Outlook, Teams, and SharePoint.

It gives insights into email open rates, meeting participation, and overall engagement, as well as anonymized sentiment tracking through integrated feedback and behavioral patterns. Viva’s dashboards give leadership visibility into organizational health while protecting individual privacy.

Key measurement features:

• Outlook and Teams usage analytics
• Email open/click stats
• Sentiment and burnout risk analysis
• Feedback loops embedded into Microsoft 365 workflows
• Team-level insights and manager dashboards

PS. Make sure to consider Prowly, a tool that helps you get immediate PR insights for protecting and improving your brand reputation.

How to choose the right communication measurement tool

You may be confused seeing so many tools in one place, so we'll help you choose the right one for your needs. Just go through our process, step by step.

1. Identify your primary communication type.
   Who do you talk to, where and how? Is it internally with your team, externally with your customers, or a mix of both?
2. Define your goals.
   Do you want to build engagement or trust, increase your reach, improve your brand sentiment, or something else?
3. Consider your integration needs.
   Does the tool need to integrate with the rest of your tool stack, e.g. your project management tool?
4. Determine your budget.
   Dedicated PR tools can get very expensive, very fast, so set a number and stick to it.
5. Discuss your automation needs.
   Do you need something specific like weekly emails with all of your mentions sorted by sentiment?
6. Determine your reporting needs.
   What kind of reports do you need and how detailed should they be? How frequently do you want to receive them?

When you answer all of these questions, you'll know exactly what type of tool you need so you can start looking in the right direction.

How Prowly helps with measuring communication effectiveness

Prowly can help you find out how effectively you communicate with your target audience with a range of qualitative and quantitative measurement features.

Media monitoring

Prowly helps you stay on top of earned media coverage by tracking where your brand is mentioned, how often, and in what context. You can see the tone of coverage (positive, neutral, or negative), measure volume over time, and assess whether published articles align with your key messaging.

And you can track the most important mentions across both online and offline media.

Pitching tool

When you send out a pitch through Prowly, you can see who opened it, clicked links, or replied, giving you a clear view of media interest and engagement. This helps you understand which stories resonate with journalists and refine your outreach over time.

Press release metrics

Prowly tracks how your press releases perform once they’re sent. You’ll see metrics like open rates, click-throughs, and how far your release reached in terms of potential visibility. These insights help you gauge what’s getting attention and what might need reworking.

Campaign reporting

You can build custom reports that present your PR campaign results clearly and professionally. These reports include media pickup, journalist engagement, sentiment, and more, making it easy to show the value of your work to clients or internal teams.

Message consistency

Prowly helps you check whether your brand’s core messages are being picked up and reflected in media coverage. It highlights how closely the language used in press articles matches what you intended to communicate, so you can spot gaps or adjust your approach.

📈 With Prowly, you don’t just send press releases. You also measure how well they’re received, who picks them up, and how they shape your brand’s perception.

Quantitative vs. qualitative communication measurement?

Now that we've covered the tools, it's time to explore how to measure your communication efforts—starting with the two main approaches: quantitative and qualitative.

Quantitative measurement uses numerical data to assess communication performance. It answers “how many,” “how often,” and “to what extent?”

Examples of quantitative measures: email open rates, page views, number of press release mentions, social media shares and impressions, among others.

➕ Measuring communication quantitatively is easy to benchmark, objective and scalable.
➖ You'll miss the nuances and explanations of why people did (or did not) engage with your content.

Qualitative measurement uses descriptive, non-numerical data to understand the meaning, sentiment, and interpretation behind communication. It answers the “why” and “how” questions.

Examples of qualitative communication measurements: open-ended employee feedback, focus group discussions, one-on-one interviews, media tone analysis, and related methods.

➕ Qualitative measurement captures context, emotions and subtle signals that quantitative measurement cannot. It's excellent for further interpreting quantitative findings.
➖ It's harder to scale and benchmark and is much more time-consuming.

Core metrics to track (for both internal and PR teams)

Whether you want to track communication within your team or your customers, there are plenty of metrics to choose from. It can feel overwhelming to settle on just a few, so we singled out the top metrics to start tracking today.

Internal communication metrics

How do you measure effective communication in your team? Depending on the tools you use, it can be very easy. Focus on these core internal communication metrics:

• Message open rates: the percentage of employees who open internal emails or messages, indicating initial interest or awareness.
• Employee survey participation: the proportion of staff who complete internal surveys, reflecting engagement and willingness to share feedback.
• Intranet/article views: the number of times employees access a specific page or content item on the intranet, measuring content reach.
• Read receipts or confirmations: acknowledgments that employees have read and understood a message, often used for compliance or policy updates.
• Engagement (likes, comments, shares): interactive actions taken by employees on internal platforms, showing how actively they are connecting with the content.

External / PR-focused communication metrics

Communication analytics from external stakeholders are arguably more relevant. These metrics are some great starting points:

• Media pickup volume: the total number of times your story, press release, or brand is mentioned in the media over a given period.
• Message consistency: the degree to which your core messages or brand positioning are reflected accurately and repeatedly throughout media coverage.
• Share of voice: your brand’s portion of total media coverage in your industry or market compared to competitors.
• Sentiment/tone of coverage: an analysis of whether media mentions are positive, neutral, or negative whenever someone mentions your brand.
• Journalist engagement (opens, replies): how reporters interact with your outreach, measured by email opens, click-throughs, or direct replies to your press release pitches.

Conclusion

Communication can no longer be a guessing game. With clients and in-house managers measuring where every dollar goes, it's up to the PR team to show the results of their work. With the right communication measurement tools, you'll know the exact effects of your work and how to present them to the person in charge.

The post Top Communication Measurement Tools for PR Pros (2025) appeared first on Prowly.

The truth is that you don't have to imagine it, because there are keyword tracking apps that do exactly this: alert you every time someone mentions you.

Today, we’re covering ten of the very best keyword monitoring tools in the industry, along with their pros, cons, and pricing.

What is keyword monitoring?

Keyword monitoring is the process of tracking mentions of a certain keyword online, on websites, social media, forums, online communities, and on offline platforms such as newspapers, magazines, and TV broadcasts.

Keyword monitoring, media monitoring, and social media monitoring are often bundled together, which is fair, as they overlap quite a bit. But there are distinct differences too:

Wanna know more about the differences between these three? Read these articles:
➖ What's the Difference Between Social Listening and Social Monitoring in PR?
➖ Top 15+ Social Listening Tools for PR Pros
➖ How to Create a Powerful Social Listening Strategy for PR?

What makes PR keyword monitoring different from SEO keyword monitoring?

Keyword monitoring is used in both PR and SEO contexts, but it has different meanings in each.

In PR, keyword monitoring involves tracking all instances of a specific keyword (whether branded or another keyword) as it appears across different online platforms.

In SEO, keyword monitoring is about tracking the search engine performance of certain keywords. In other words, who is ranking for a certain keyword in the top results (in search engines like Google) and how your business or your clients are ranking for that keyword.

PR keyword monitoring is about what’s being said about you out in the world.
SEO keyword monitoring is about how people find you through search engines.

Top keyword monitoring tools (with PR-specific use cases)

Whether you work in-house as a part of a marketing or PR team or in an agency, a keyword monitoring tool is an excellent addition to your tech stack. Let's help you find the best keyword tracker for your needs.

#1 Prowly

Prowly is a dedicated PR software suite built for media monitoring, journalist outreach, press release publishing, and reporting. Prowly's keyword monitoring capabilities are explicitly tailored to track brand mentions, product names, executive references, and more across digital media and both online and offline platforms.

Pros:

✅ Built specifically for PR teams and agencies
✅ Combines media monitoring, pitching, and campaign reporting in one place
✅ Filters by sentiment, language, region, or domain type
✅ Lets you build custom media lists and track pitch engagement
✅ Helps build highly visual reports for stakeholders
✅ Covers both online and offline (print and broadcast) mentions

Cons:

❌ Media monitoring is only available in higher-tier plans

PR-specific use case:

A comms team launches a new product and wants to track where the brand and product names are being mentioned across the news. Prowly provides real-time alerts and sentiment analysis and lets users bundle this into a campaign report to show stakeholders engagement the release received.

💸 Pricing: Starts at $339/month with media monitoring included.

#2 Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a simple, free tool that lets you track mentions of specific keywords across Google-indexed content; such as news, blogs, and websites.

Pros:

✅ Completely free
✅ Easy to set up
✅ Delivers mentions to your inbox

Cons:

❌ No analytics or sentiment analysis
❌ No coverage of social media or paywalled content
❌ High risk of irrelevant results or missed mentions

PR-specific use case:

A small PR team sets up alerts for a brand name and competitor to stay updated on basic media coverage without needing a full monitoring platform.

💸 Pricing: Free

#3 Brand24

Brand24 is a media and social monitoring platform that tracks mentions of keywords across websites, forums, blogs, and social media. It’s popular among PR, marketing, and brand teams.

Pros:

✅ Covers social media, blogs, and forums in addition to news
✅ Real-time alerts with sentiment analysis
✅ Influencer scoring and reach metrics
✅ Team collaboration tools

Cons:

❌ The interface can be overwhelming for beginners
❌ Historical data and premium features are only available in higher plans

PR-specific use case:

A PR team managing a brand reputation campaign uses Brand24 to track the volume and tone of media mentions across different online channels, including Reddit and Twitter.

💸 Pricing: Starts at $199/month

#4 Mention

Mention offers media and social listening tools to monitor keywords, track sentiment, and analyze conversations in real time across digital platforms.

Pros:

✅ User-friendly dashboard
✅ Good real-time capabilities
✅ Includes social listening and analytics
✅ Offers automation rules for alerts

Cons:

❌ Limited historical data in lower plans
❌ May miss some smaller media outlets

PR-specific use case:

A boutique PR agency tracks client brand mentions across the web and Twitter and uses Mention’s sentiment filter to flag potential reputation risks.

💸 Pricing: Starts at $49/month

#5 Meltwater

Meltwater is a high-end media intelligence platform offering extensive global coverage across news, broadcast, print, social media, and podcasts. It’s designed for large PR and comms teams.

Pros:

✅ Access to premium and paywalled news sources
✅ Broadcast and print coverage
✅ Strong analytics, share of voice, and campaign tracking tools
✅ Integrates with newsroom and CRM tools

Cons:

❌ Expensive and complex to set up
❌ Locked-in contracts with custom pricing

PR-specific use case:

A global PR team needs to monitor a brand crisis across multiple markets and languages. Meltwater provides cross-platform media insights, historical context, and customizable dashboards.

💸 Pricing: Meltwater pricing is estimated at $15,000/yr to $20,000/yr.

#6 Talkwalker

Talkwalker offers powerful media and social listening features, plus visual recognition tools to track brand logos and keywords in images and videos.

Pros:

✅ AI-driven sentiment analysis and trend spotting
✅ Visual brand recognition
✅ Tracks across social, news, broadcast, and podcasts
✅ Competitor benchmarking

Cons:

❌ Enterprise-level pricing
❌ Setup and onboarding can take time

PR-specific use case:

A brand manager uses Talkwalker to detect logo placements and mentions during a sponsored event, monitoring both text and image-based content across media.

💸 Pricing: Starts at ~$9,600/year (custom plans)

#7 Semrush

While primarily an SEO platform, Semrush includes a brand monitoring tool that lets users track mentions of any keyword across the web, including backlinks and media sites.

Pros:

✅ Combines PR and SEO visibility in one dashboard
✅ Tracks new backlinks and brand mentions
✅ Shows domain authority and estimated traffic

Cons:

❌ Limited social media coverage
❌ Not PR-specific, it lacks sentiment and journalist insights

PR-specific use case:

A digital PR team uses Semrush to track the number of backlinks and mentions earned from their latest campaign and evaluates media authority.

💸 Pricing: Starts at $139.95/month

#8 Ahrefs

Ahrefs is an SEO tool that includes alerts for brand mentions and backlinks, helping digital PR teams keep track of earned media value from campaigns.

Pros:

✅ Strong backlink monitoring
✅ Tracks unlinked brand mentions
✅ Includes SEO metrics like domain rating

Cons:

❌ No sentiment analysis or PR dashboards
❌ Not focused on traditional media or journalist relationships

PR-specific use case:

A PR team running a link-building campaign uses Ahrefs to track which articles mention the brand and whether they include a link — helping them follow up with journalists.

💸 Pricing: Starts at $129/month

#9 Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a social media management platform with strong listening features. It helps PR teams track keyword mentions and sentiment on platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok.

Pros:

✅ Strong sentiment and trend analysis
✅ Unified inbox for team collaboration
✅ Visual reports for brand health and awareness
✅ Competitor comparison tools

Cons:

❌ No coverage of traditional media (news, blogs)
❌ Price scales quickly with team size

PR-specific use case:

A PR team monitors public sentiment around a new ad campaign, tracking hashtags and branded keywords in real time during rollout.

💸 Pricing: Starts at $199/month

#10 Social Searcher

Social Searcher is a lightweight social media monitoring tool that lets you track keyword mentions across platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and web blogs. It focuses on real-time insights and is a good fit for individuals or small teams who want simple monitoring without enterprise-level complexity.

Pros:

✅ Free tier available with basic monitoring
✅ Tracks keywords across multiple social platforms
✅ Sentiment analysis included
✅ Exports to Excel and offers basic analytics

Cons:

❌ Limited media coverage outside social channels
❌ Dated interface and limited automation
❌ No journalist database or PR-specific outreach features

PR-specific use case:

A small business or solo PR pro uses Social Searcher to monitor real-time reactions on social media to a product launch or press coverage, especially looking for user sentiment and influencer engagement.

💸 Pricing: starts at 8.49EUR/month

Free vs. paid keyword tracking tools

Free keyword tracking tools offer tons of value, but they have certain limitations. If you're just keen to try out keyword tracking, starting with a free tool makes a lot of sense.

However, if you're looking to utilize a keyword monitoring tool on a daily basis, considering paid tools is the smarter move. Here is how to know which one to go for.

✅ Go with a free tool if you:

• Only need basic alerts (e.g., mentions of your brand name or a campaign hashtag)
• Are okay with limited sources (most free tools focus on the web or the news, not forums, podcasts, or social)
• Don’t need detailed metrics or analytics — just want to be notified when something pops up
• Have a tight budget and can afford to miss some mentions or dig manually for insights
• Are testing the waters or running a short-term campaign

🛠 Examples: Google Alerts, Talkwalker Alerts, Social Searcher (basic plans)

💼 Choose a paid tool if you:

• Need real-time alerts across multiple channels, including news, social media, blogs, and podcasts
• Want access to sentiment analysis, audience reach, or share of voice
• Manage multiple campaigns or clients and need dashboards, tags, or exports
• Want to measure PR impact over time with consistent tracking and reporting tools
• Need reliable support and integrations (e.g., Slack, email digests, or media lists)

🛠 Examples: Prowly (media monitoring), Brand24, Meltwater, Mention

Four tips to make the most of your keyword monitoring

To make the most out of keyword monitoring in your PR and marketing team, you need to treat it as a crucial marketing activity, not as an afterthought. Here are some of our top tips to get the most out of keyword monitoring.

1️⃣ Set up alerts for spokespersons, execs and other relevant people in your business.

This way, you'll get a notification every time they're mentioned by bloggers, content creators, and other businesses.

2️⃣ Monitor campaign keywords in real time.

Instead of waiting for reports to come in every week or month, monitor your keywords as they come into your dashboard. This helps you prevent crises and spot opportunities as they appear.

3️⃣ Track competitors and industry trends.

Monitoring your own branded terms is a great start, but you can also keep an eye on the competition and broader industry terms.

4️⃣ Pair monitoring with media outreach for optimal results.

If you see certain outlets covering relevant keywords (e.g., your competitors or important industry terms), use outreach tools to get in touch with the journalist(s). They might be interested in talking about you too.

Conclusion

Keyword monitoring can help you stay on top of who mentions you, when, and in what context. The best keyword tracking tools are those that combine keyword monitoring with other PR-specific features, such as sentiment analysis, press release and pitching tools, a media database, and others.

In other words, your PR team needs Prowly. It lets you monitor, create beautiful and comprehensive reports, and prove the value of ROI to every stakeholder involved.

The post Top Keyword Monitoring Tools for PR Pros in 2025 appeared first on Prowly.

The right tool offers more than metrics—it brings real-time alerts, sentiment analysis, and competitor tracking to make Twitter monitoring smarter. When planning a campaign, think of it as your shortcut to faster, sharper insights.

Below, you'll find some of the best Twitter monitoring tools—both paid and free—to help you get started.

What is X (Twitter) monitoring and why is it essential for PR?

Twitter monitoring is all about keeping an eye on what’s being said about your brand—from mentions and hashtags to key voices and even competitors.

Knowing how to track Twitter mentions isn’t just helpful–it allows you to catch issues early, spot trends as they unfold, and stay in control of your brand reputation.

It also gives valuable insight into tone and sentiment—so you understand not just the message, but the mood behind it. To do it right, you’ll need the right tools—let’s take a look at some of the best Twitter monitoring tools available today.

Best X (Twitter) monitoring tools for PR pros

Wondering which social media monitoring tools you should consider? Here's a quick comparison of some of the best options available on the market today:

P.S. If you're interested in more than just Twitter, check out this exhaustive list of the best social media management tools for PR professionals.

#1. Prowly

Price: Starting at $258 per month

Free trial? Yes, 7 days

Key features:

• All-in-one PR tool, so all features are tailored to specific needs
• Media monitoring and social media listening with PR metrics
• Audience insights, sentiment analysis, robust media database

Best for: small teams, PR agencies, in-house brands

#2. TweetDeck (X Pro)

Price: Included in X Premium

Free trial? No

Key features:

• One social media platform for posting content and monitoring activity
• Scheduling posts, managing multiple accounts, customizable timelines
• Affordable option for those who don't need deep insights

Best for: Freelancers, social media teams, small brands

#3. Brand24

Price: Starting at $199/month

Free trial? Yes, 14 days

Key features:

• In the cheapest plan, you can track 3 keywords for up to 2k mentions per month
• Includes a detailed AI sentiment analysis
• Allows you to measure social media reach, SoV, engagement, AVE, and presence score

Best for: small brands, agencies, small to mid-sized teams.

#4: Sprout Social

Price: Starting at $199 per month

Free trial? Yes, 30 days

Key features:

• You can manage completely different profiles (great if you have multiple Twitter accounts)
• Allows you to schedule posts in advance, engage with followers and do a performance analysis
• Full scale Twitter monitoring with brand mentions, industry keywords, and hashtags

Best for: large enterprises, established agencies with bigger budgets

#5. Brandwatch

Price: Available upon request

Free trial? No

Key features:

• Allows you to track brand mentions with detailed sentiment analysis
• You can segment data into countries, regions, and demographics
• Historical data access going back to 2010

Best for: large companies, dedicated social media teams with bigger budgets

#6. Mention

Price: Starting at $41 per month

Free trial? Yes

Key features:

• Offers social media monitoring for different platforms
• Allows you to set up alerts with tags within those alerts for detailed monitoring
• Really cool one - you can integrate Mention with Slack

Best for: Freelancers, startups, smaller marketing and communications teams

P.S. Here’s an article that might come in handy if you’re looking for a tool to measure the impact of your communication efforts.

Free X (Twitter) monitoring tools

While the best Twitter monitoring tools are not free, there are other options you can use if you're just starting out or you're on a budget. Here are the three most popular ones:

• Google Alerts - probably the most famous free option out there. It's easy to set up so you don't need any additional skills. You can also get updates through your email, so you don't have to refresh it constantly to see if something new has popped up. However, it misses real-time mentions because many aren't indexed by Google at all.
• X (Twitter) Analytics - the social media platform has a built-in system to track mentions by providing you with information such as top tweets, top mentions, whether you've gained or lost followers, conversions, link clicks, and more. The down side? You won't be able to track sentiment or share of voice.
• Talkwalker - they offer a free search for Twitter mentions that will give you 7 days of historical data. As opposed to Google Alerts, they also give you a Boolean search option so you can customize the results you're getting.

Which tool should I choose to track mentions (if I work in PR)?

Prowly has been built specifically for PR pros and agencies, not just for monitoring Twitter mentions or doing social media management. It's an all-in-one platform for public relations specialists who need an accurate media database, PR CRM, pitching features, monitoring, and reporting.

Prowly has:

• PR-focused options, so you won't need to sort through features you don't need
• Comprehensive reporting and stakeholder-ready visualizations
• Tracking across multiple sources with alerts and sentiment analysis

Is it the best Twitter listening tool for PR specialists? Absolutely.

4 Key features to look for in X (Twitter) monitoring tools

When exploring Twitter monitoring tools, it's important to focus on all of the features it has to offer. What's even more important, if the tool itself has capabilities that are relevant to your work. No one needs a tool with fancy features if you're only going to take advantage of a fraction of the product.

#1 Real-time alerts

Overnight success, or overnight crisis?

Whatever it is, you'll know it before your morning cup of coffee if the tool you choose can provide you with real-time alerts. This is especially useful if you want to track brand mentions right after you launch a new product or campaign.

#2 Sentiment analysis

Set them up before you run any social media campaigns.

A flicker of negativity is much easier to manage than a full-blown crisis. With Prowly, you can also track sentiment analysis across different channels like social media vs. online outlets to see how your reputation performs in all spaces.

#3 Keyword tracking

Great Twitter monitoring tools should also have the option to track keywords.

Not brands or people - keywords. That's because sometimes a keyword that's so attached to your brand can be said elsewhere, and you might miss it otherwise.

#4 Competitor monitoring

You can monitor Twitter activity for any mentions of your competitors. How about analyzing them?

A good twitter monitoring tool should be able to collect all mentions of your competitors, and analyze them with metrics such as SOV, estimated reach across different countries, and so on.

#5 Comprehensive reporting

"So Henry, how much am I spending on these Twitter listening tools again?."

You've probably heard your boss ask you what's the cost, and while you can get Twitter monitoring tools free, usually those paid options have cool features that can elevate your game. For example, coverage reports.

How to monitor Twitter mentions with Prowly?

Prowly's media monitoring transforms into a Twitter monitoring tool with the right settings. If you're in public relations, a good PR platform should have this option available for you. Why? Because important conversations can happen everywhere, and you can't risk a reputation oopsie if you're not monitoring all channels holistically.

This is what the process looks like:

Set up a monitoring query

First, set up the name of your query so you can have everything organized. We'd usually recommend doing a name of your campaign plus quarter or year so you can easily find it later on.

Choose where you'd like the monitoring to happen

If you're using Prowly as a Twitter monitoring tool only, you can select "X" from the Social media and Sources options.

Just in case you'd like to monitor mentions elsewhere, there are all kinds of sources available for you, including print and broadcast monitoring.

Analyze and evaluate results

With an abundance of metrics available, you can gauge your campaign's success or underperformances by looking at visual data. It's easier to spot trends this way, and explain your reasoning to people who might not understand all nuances of PR or marketing (but will understand red or green on charts).

Report back to stakeholders with concrete data

It's rare that a Twitter social listening tool has this option, but coverage reports are a great way to present your work to clients and stakeholders. It helps show the impact you made, what the campaign achieved and well... shows that you need a Twitter listening tool in your budget.

What all of this means for your PR strategy

Monitoring X (Twitter) is an essential component of any PR strategy. Whether you're doing it to stay ahead of competitors, want to simply monitor brand conversations or manage your reputation, you need this kind of monitoring in your arsenal.

Choosing the best suited tool will work to your advantage in all shape and form. Pick the one that matches your needs best. If that's for PR, then Prowly is your answer.

Ready to see how Prowly can support you?

Dig deep into Prowly's social media monitoring features and start tracking all kinds of mentions more effectively, starting today.

The post Best Twitter Monitoring Tools for PR Specialists in 2025 (Paid + Free Options) appeared first on Prowly.