Six Digital Tools that Digital Public Relations Practitioners should consider in 2020

The Public Relations landscape like every other sector of  life in the digital era will witness more transformation from 2020 onward. This will be especially noticeable in the tools deployed to create sustainable mutual relationship between organisations and their publics . I have a list of these tools captured below :

Hootsuite. This is a social media update service. It allows users to schedule and post updates on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. This takes away the stress of multiple updates on social media and enables users to schedule posts for particular periods of the day or months. For a stress free multiple social media accounts management, Hootsuite is the answer.

Google Docs. This is collaborative work tool which is free for individuals but a paid service for corporate organisations. It enables multiple people to work on a document at once. The document is stored in cloud and changes made are saved automatically. It allows people to work on the go and even makes a provision to share such documents to people working outside of the group. To understand the effectiveness of the document, let us imagine an entity is in crisis mode and needs people to work on a single document, say a press release for example, as quickly as possible, Google Docs will come to the rescue.

Google Analytics. The analytics service helps monitor traffic on an organization’s website and blogs. It checks the direction, intensity and location of people visiting the sites. It is more detailed and could be a good source of data that can assist businesses to make important decisions. For instance, the analytics trace the online and physical locations of your website users. The service also gives clear clues on the search phrases people use, length of stay on the website and number of pages people view on the website.

Google Alerts. This alert service by Google is free and could assist PR practitioners to set up alert for the company name, competitors and even keywords relevant to the industry such that when such words are mentioned, the PR person get alerted. It enables practitioners to stay ahead of issues as they break online. The issue monitoring function of Public Relations could be enhanced greatly in this period of massive digital presence of both the internal and external publics of institutions, government and corporate bodies.

Google Form : It is a survey form designed to conduct research and seek opinions. It is an online survey form that enables users to collect data and get it analysed. Users can set up as many questions as needed and share the links for respondents to answer. It gives details of the respondents, generates insights and necessary graphics to illustrate information acquired. Such could be downloaded as an Excel document for further use.   

Share Through : This website assists you to create engaging headlines for your articles. It analyzes headlines looking at the engagement and impression scores. The headline quality score is given with a breakdown of the components that make the suggested headline strong or weak.