The job of a PR person can sometimes be somewhat exhausting. Writing press releases and other media communications to promote your clients and nourish their public image, preparing and holding presentations, organizing and attending events, doing various sorts of analyses for your clients, using social media effectively or finding influencers to promote certain brands – to name a few PR tasks – all take a lot of time and effort.
But, since we live in the age of technology and automation, a lot of these PR tasks can be automated. How? Through a process called PR automation. Simply put, PR automation means using modern technologies to automate certain PR tasks to make the job of PR professionals easier, without (negatively) affecting the relations they have spent so much effort and time building and developing.
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So, PR automation won’t “take the soul” out of your job in any way. It will only enhance it by automating some rather technical tasks. That way, it can help you save time and focus on other, non-automatable segments of your job.
Having this in mind, we decided to compose a list of a few PR tasks that can be automated through various online tools.
#1 Schedule social media posts with Buffer, Postify or Hootsuite
As a PR person, you know the importance of implementing social media into your client’s general PR and digital marketing strategy.
Nowadays people interact with your clients mostly through social media channels. That’s why it’s important to give out a clear message to the audience on social media and use it wisely.
Create a powerful brand image, build brand presence, or curate brand voice, all while being careful not to cause any backlash with your posts. The last thing you’d want is to post something insensitive.
But, to even begin building a relationship with your audience through social media, you have to start posting first. And it is best to post regularly. Otherwise, the brand will hardly grow a favorable amount of followers through which it could, in the long run, spread their voice and image. This is where the first automatable PR task comes into the conversation. Scheduling and posting on social media.
If you’ve been posting on social media manually, stop doing it right now. Various online tools will do it for you. That way, you’ll save your time and focus on other tasks that you’ve got on your plate. And yes, we know, there are a lot of them.
Tools like Buffer, Postify, or Hootsuite, all of which offer free plans, allow you to schedule your posts on social media and then post them for you in the precise time you noted. Meaning, once you took a few minutes to schedule your posts, you can go on with other tasks without worrying about posting on social media. If for some reason you don’t fancy using any special scheduling tools, some social media channels, like Facebook or Twitter, offer the feature themselves and let you easily schedule your posts for free.
#2 Writing e-mails and press releases
Another crucial part of your job as a PR person is writing press releases and e-mails. To have any impact, they need to be interesting, grammatically correct, and sent to the right people. Here are a few tools that will help you get the best out of your written statements.
Make your press releases eye-catching with Prowly
Prowly offers various features that will ease your PR work. Especially when it comes to writing press releases. It can help you analyze how people react to your content, foster long-term media relationships, find the right media contacts for your story (you can access a database of over 1 000 000 contacts), pitch your story, personalize your e-mails, sync, and manage your contacts or prepare an up-to-date newsroom. It is suitable for any PR need, from PR agencies to in-house PR teams and small businesses.
Its press release creator enables you to make your press releases eye-catching and automatable, and easy to write. It can automatically drag the names of the contacts for you, making the greeting part (“Hi, firstname”) of the press release even easier. Moreover, with Prowly’s intuitive drag and drop press release creator, you can add social media posts, photos, videos, or other media to your press release to make your news story even more interesting to the reader.
Once you’ve written your press release, you can easily share it with all its attachments through one simple link. Prowly offers a free 7-day trial, so you can try it out yourself right after reading this blog.
#3 Find e-mail addresses quickly with Findthat, Email Hunter and Clearbit
A powerful and eye-catching text, of course, means nothing if you don’t know who to send it out to. Manually searching for people’s e-mail addresses through their websites can be a long and sometimes fruitless process.
Luckily for you, this is yet another automatable PR task. Your list of e-mails can be composed in a few clicks. Tools like Findthat, Email Hunter, or Clearbit search for and discover publicly available e-mail addresses for you in a few seconds.
All three tools have free plans available. You might want to check them out yourself.
Write grammatically correct texts with Grammarly
Before you start sending out your eye-catching e-mails and press releases to e-mail addresses you found via Findthat, Email hunter, or other tools, it is crucial to check that they are written correctly. Bad grammar and spelling in your e-mails will come out as unprofessional to anyone who reads them.
In this segment, your go-to ally is Grammarly. It is a free online writing assistant and automated grammar checker, which can also be easily added as a Google Chrome extension. That way, you are one click away from leaving a good impression through a grammatically perfect text.
#4 Use Determ for public relations monitoring
For PR professionals, one of the most important tasks is knowing what the public thinks of your clients. Especially if their opinion is not so positive. This is where public relations monitoring comes into conversation.
Media monitoring tools like Determ allow PR professionals to prevent crises, manage their brand reputation, and always be in the know about what is being said about their clients online. When using media monitoring tools for public relations monitoring, PR professionals can monitor online mentions of their clients across the web to anticipate any backlash and respond to it quickly if it happens.
Determ can provide PR experts with great insight in this area. It monitors mentions for 100+ million sources 24/7, in any language. Whether you want to use it on your laptop, or via mobile app if you are on the go, Determ’s user-friendly feed will give you insight into all online mentions of your tracked keywords in real-time. You can scroll through them and understand where your clients stand in the eyes of the public. That way, you will always know if there is anything you should worry about.
To make keeping up with your mentions easier, Determ’s Alerts feature provides you with real-time notifications. You receive these notifications whenever a new mention of your tracked keyword appears. You can receive them on your e-mail, Slack, or mobile app. Determ offers a free trial, so you can try out this media monitoring tool yourself to see if it fits your needs.
#5 Create a list of influencers
Besides reputation management and crisis prevention, PR professionals can use public relations monitoring to automate yet another task – creating a list of influencers.
Influencers are people who can influence potential users of a product or service by promoting the items or the brand on social media. They have become very important to many brands, and PR professionals, of course.
But, instead of looking for influencers manually, media monitoring tools like Determ will find them for you. They will even create a list of influencers who talked the most about your tracked topic. For example, when tracking keywords in Determ, the tool will give you a list of top influencers by number of mentions, top influencers by source, and top influencers by reach.
That way, you know who talked about your tracked keyword the most, on which channel and how big was their reach, so you can pick the influencer who suits your needs the best.
Conclusion
It is a known fact that the job of a PR person requires a lot of time and effort. Unfortunately, sometimes that precious time is being spent on numerous, rather technical and dull tasks. Luckily, we live in the age of automation.
PR automation is becoming more and more popular among PR people, for a reason. A lot of PR practitioners are starting to realize that, by using the support of smart tools that will do those dull tasks for them, they have the ability to save their time, focus on other important segments of their job and basically become a one-man army.
So, if you are still contemplating whether or not to automate certain PR tasks, all we have to say is – do it. Start by using the tools we’ve mentioned and let them become the number one business ally in your new one-man army.