If your brand ended up in a headline today, would you know it?
Earned media can build your reputation (or quietly break it) without costing you a dime in ad spend. But if you’re not monitoring it, you’re flying blind.
Today’s news spreads fast and public opinion shifts faster. That’s why keeping tabs on what others are saying about you is a modern day public relations survival skill. Here’s how you can hone yours with earned media monitoring.
Contents:
What Is Earned Media Monitoring?
Why Is Earned Media Important?
Earned Media vs. Paid and Owned Media
How to Track Earned Media Mentions
Best Tools for Earned Media Monitoring
Measuring the ROI of Earned Media
Best Practices for Effective Earned Media Monitoring
Maximizing Earned Media with Meltwater
What Is Earned Media Monitoring?
Earned Media Monitoring definition: the process of tracking and analyzing unpaid brand mentions across news outlets, blogs, social media, and other third-party sites.
Earned media monitoring watches for coverage you didn’t pay for or publish yourself. Think press mentions, influencer content, product reviews, and viral social media posts.
Why Is Earned Media Important?
Earned media is what other people are saying about your brand to other people. When a journalist, influencer, or publication mentions your brand in a story, it feels authentic.
In many cases, it’s what potential customers trust the most. Monitoring earned media gives you a real-time view of your brand’s reputation. It can also help you spot trends, measure PR impact, and catch issues before they become crises.
Every mention has the power to add to or detract from your brand image. When you actively track this coverage, you can spot opportunities to amplify press coverage, address negative feedback early, and learn how the public really sees you.
These insights are gold for your PR and marketing. It tells you what messages are resonating and where your brand visibility is growing. It’s a core part of knowing who your audience is and how to stay relevant and in front of them.
Earned Media vs. Paid and Owned Media
All media holds value, but earned, paid, and owned media each bring something unique to your PR and marketing:
- Earned media is what you don’t control. It’s organic coverage that comes from others talking about your brand.
- Paid media includes anything you spend money on — ads, sponsored posts, influencer partnerships, etc.
- Owned media is everything you control, like your website, blog, social media channels, and email newsletters.
The real power comes when earned, paid, and owned media work together. For example, earned and paid media drive traffic to your owned platforms. Owned media ensures a consistent voice and message. Earned media adds social proof and credibility, boosting your owned media.
Monitoring earned media ensures you’re not just pushing messages out, but also listening to what’s coming back in. When you align all three, you build a more effective, balanced media strategy your audience can trust.
TIP: Check out our Data-Driven PR Playbook to learn more about tools and strategies that can help your earned media monitoring efforts!
How to Track Earned Media Mentions
To track earned media mentions, you need to know where to look. Here’s how you can track mentions based on where they come from.
Traditional media monitoring
Traditional media includes newspapers, TV, radio, and magazines. These channels might seem old-school, but they still carry serious influence.
Tools like media clipping services or offline media monitoring platforms help you catch these mentions as they happen. However, solutions like Meltwater can help you combine traditional and digital media with social media data for a comprehensive view of your brand's coverage.
Digital media monitoring
Digital media includes blogs, social media sites, podcasts, online news outlets, and forums like Reddit or Quora. These are fast-moving spaces where public opinion spreads quickly and virally.
Tools like Google Alerts can catch basic mentions, but dedicated platforms like Meltwater scan millions of digital data points to give you real-time updates and analytics.
Sentiment analysis and trend tracking
Beyond just counting mentions, smart media monitoring involves sentiment analysis and trend tracking. You should know how people are talking about your brand, and whether it’s positive, negative, or neutral.
This data gives you context, not just numbers. You can use these insights to find patterns, measure and analyze media coverage and its impact, and stay ahead of emerging trends before they shape your brand for you.
Best Tools for Earned Media Monitoring
There are quite a few tools in the “earned media media monitoring” category. These stand out for their accuracy, reach, and features.
Meltwater
Meltwater’s media intelligence covers traditional and digital media in one platform. It monitors more than 270,000 news sources, social media platforms, podcasts, newspapers, and other outlets.
AI-powered features and customizable dashboards and reports help you make sense of the numbers so you can see how your coverage impacts your strategy.
Brandwatch
Brandwatch focuses on social listening and trend analysis. It analyzes conversations across social networks, blogs, and news, helping brands zero in on audience sentiment and overall brand image.
Brandwatch makes it easy to compare data over time so you can track how your brand health evolves alongside media coverage.
Cision
Built for PR teams, Cision monitors media and manages outreach in one platform. It combines earned media tracking with press release distribution, journalist database access, and campaign management and measurement tools.
Cision is ideal for strong brands that do a lot of media pitching. You can track each pitch within the platform and see how your outreach pays off.
Mention
Mention supports small businesses and growing brands with brand mentioning monitoring. It checks multiple sources, including blogs, news sites, and social media, to find mentions in real time.
A simple alert system combined with affordability makes it ideal for users who are new to media monitoring.
Features to look for in a media monitoring tool
Media monitoring should go beyond basic mention tracking. Other features to look for include:
- Multi-channel coverage (traditional and digital)
- Real-time alerts
- Sentiment analysis
- Share of voice
- Trend tracking
- Influencer identification
- Geographic and language filters
- Historical data
- Reporting tools
- Visualization options
- AI-driven analysis
AI provides one of the biggest advancements in media monitoring. Automation and AI can instantly sort through thousands of articles and posts, identify the tone of each mention, and flag emerging trends without human input.
AI also helps with natural language processing, which means the system can understand context, not just keywords. This gives brands more accurate alerts, better insights, and less time spent digging through irrelevant noise.
Measuring the ROI of Earned Media
Tracking earned media is only half the battle. You also need to prove its value.
To do this, you’ll need to track key performance indicators (KPIs) that illustrate each mention’s impact. Common KPIs include:
- Volume of mentions (how often your brand is discussed)
- Reach and impressions (how many people saw the mention)
- Sentiment (positive, neutral, or negative tone)
- Share of voice (how your brand stacks up against competitors in the media landscape)
- Backlinks and SEO impact (how mentions drive traffic and improve search rankings)
- Engagement (likes, shares, comments on social media posts or articles)
Earned media’s value doesn't always tie directly to sales, which is why attribution models are essential. A multi-touch attribution model works best here, especially in PR and marketing campaigns where earned media builds awareness at the top of the funnel.
For example, you might not see an immediate conversion from a mention, but that media coverage could be the first step in a longer customer journey. Tools like Google Analytics, UTM parameters, and CRM integration help track how earned media influences traffic, conversions, or brand lift over time.
Earned Media Case Study: GoStudent
Meltwater client GoStudent uses media monitoring to quantify and measure each mention. The startup relies on press coverage to expand its business. A global presence makes collecting each mention challenging, which also complicates the way they calculate ROI of coverage.
Meltwater set up an RSS feed to improve reporting efficiency. In seconds, the client can see how many press hits they received in a given time period, break it down by market, size, audience, and other filters, and draw relevant insights from the data.
Read the full GoStudent customer story to see how Meltwater could your organization!
Best Practices for Effective Earned Media Monitoring
If you plan to use earned media monitoring in your strategy, these best practices can help you create a comprehensive plan and get the most out of every mention.
- Set up real-time alerts and notifications for your brand name, product names, key executives, and common misspellings.
- Monitor competitors and industry terms.
- Dig into the sentiment and engagement behind each mention.
- Act fast on high volumes of positive or negative mentions.
- Deploy human review teams to look for signs of sarcasm, slang, or industry-specific terms that machines might misread.
- Share positive press in your social media feeds and newsletters.
- Adjust your messaging based on what’s resonating with your audience.
- Look for patterns in coverage and sentiment.
- Work with influencers who are promoting your product.
- Use feedback to address recurring pain points.
Monitoring is part watching and part acting on what you learn.
Maximizing Earned Media with Meltwater
Earned media is one of the most powerful and unpredictable forces shaping your brand. You can’t control it, but you can track it, analyze it, and use it to your advantage.
Meltwater’s media monitoring platform acts as your eyes and ears across traditional and digital media. It monitors millions of data points across the largest number of sources in real time, ensuring you never miss a mention.
We turn mentions into meaning with AI-powered analysis, helping you uncover sentiment, share of voice, trends, and total impact.
See how Meltwater can help you enhance your earned media monitoring strategy when you request a demo by filling out the form below!
