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Digital PR is an industry where innovation and adaptation are key. With new tools, strategies, and trends emerging constantly, knowing how to filter through the noise and focus on what truly matters can set you apart. In our latest blog post, How To Stay Ahead of the Latest Trends and Insights in Digital PR with Matt Seabridge, Matt reveals how he stays ahead of the curve by streamlining his approach to finding, organising, and learning from top industry resources. His methods are designed to help you work smarter, not harder, in a fast-moving landscape.
What we’ll cover in this blog post:
Digital PR is a fast-moving and challenging industry to work in. It can be difficult to stay ahead of new trends and the latest insights in the industry. The great thing about the people who work in Digital PR is that we’re all content creators, and we love sharing tips and insights.
I love working in this industry because of the amazing community in it and all of the great resources that are produced on a regular basis. When I first ventured into the world of Digital PR, I built my knowledge and understanding purely from Twitter and newsletters, and I’ve been eager to always keep learning and stay ahead of the latest trends and insights ever since.
For the past 2-3 years now, I’ve been sharing monthly roundups of the best learning resources that people working in Digital PR should check out. For most of that time I was sharing them on Twitter, but now I’m sharing them on a weekly basis in The Digital PR Observer Newsletter.
Here are the three main steps that I follow for curating the best industry resources, and how you can follow the exact same steps to improve the results of your Digital PR activity.
Step 1: How to use alerts tools to monitor your key topics and stay ahead of Digital PR trends
When trying to stay up to date on all of the latest Digital PR resources that get posted, I have keyword alerts set up for relevant keywords that might relate to the type of content I don’t want to miss.
Whether you’re using alerts tools to track campaign coverage, or just new mentions of keywords related to your topic, the unfortunate reality is that no single tool is perfect.
Google Alerts is the go-to tool for most people. While it’s good (and free), it’s definitely not perfect, and if you’re relying exclusively on Google Alerts, you will miss things.
I would always recommend signing up for Talkwalker Alerts. It’s free to set up alerts, and in my opinion, at least, it often picks relevant pages up quicker than Google Alerts.
If you have a subscription to Ahrefs or BuzzSumo, both of these have alerts tools that you can set up too. Ahrefs Alerts will include a lot of spammy sites, but you can adjust your filters to put a minimum DR or Traffic figure on your alert which is useful. With BuzzSumo, you can also set up a Slack integration for your alerts, which can be beneficial for teams that need to react quickly to breaking news.
How effective these tools are at keeping you up to date on your key topics, ultimately comes down to the alert you’re setting up. As you do with your Google searches, you can also use search operators to better define the searches your alerts are tracking. Here are a few useful search operators to consider using in your alerts.
How to use the “AND” search operator
The AND search operator helps you remove some of the less relevant searches you get in your alerts. For example, if you want to monitor SEO articles but only those relating to links - “SEO” AND “links”
How to use the “site:” search operator
site: searches can be very useful for monitoring stories from a specific website. For example, if you have a dream publication you want to earn coverage on and you want to monitor how they cover a certain topic - site:guardian.co.uk “christmas dinner”
How to use the “OR” search operator
The OR search operator is the best way to combine multiple search alerts into one. For example, if you want to track articles related to Digital PR that might not always mention the term Digital PR - “Digital PR” OR “DigitalPR” OR “link building” OR “media databases” OR “follow links”
How to use multiple search operators together
You can also use any search operator together with another one to really help you cut through the noise and pinpoint what you’re looking for. For example, if you want to track Digital PR style campaigns related to your topic, you can set up an alert for something like - (“christmas day” OR “christmas eve”) AND (“new research” OR “map reveals” OR “survey of” OR “expert revealed” OR “study ranks” OR “best cities for”)
Step 2: How to use social media to follow your key Digital PR topics
From a Digital PR point of view, this used to be a lot easier a couple of years ago when Twitter was such an amazing resource for following Digital PR and SEO trends. These days it’s a bit harder.
LinkedIn is probably the best social media channel for tracking conversations and helpful posts relating to Digital PR, but it’s far from perfect. It does however have a good search function, which helps you to track down any Digital PR related posts. If you search for “Digital PR” OR “DigitalPR”, and sort your search by either “latest” or “best”, depending on your date range, you can usually scroll through the important stuff in 10-15 minutes.
Social channels can however be extremely useful for staying ahead of trends and insights relating to the industries you work in. Here are some quick-fire tips for how you can use different social media platforms to monitor trending topics:
Using TikTok as a Digital PR
So many trends are born on TikTok nowadays that it’s almost essential for anyone working on Reactive PR stories to be monitoring TikTok. My advice would be to create a separate account for any industry you work in, and aim to manipulate the algorithm into thinking you are obsessed with that one topic. This also helps create a better work-life balance so you’re not seeing work-related content when you’re browsing TikTok in your own time.
Using Reddit as a Digital PR
Reddit is where you’ll find the most hardcore fans of a topic. These users can be great for fact-checking key aspects of your campaign (they’re not shy in telling you when you’re wrong about something!). Reddit can also be a great distribution channel for your content or a place for Journalists to find your stories. You do have to be clever when sharing your content on there though, as it will be removed if it looks like a promotional post.
Using Instagram as a Digital PR
There are so many great data vis accounts on Instagram that you can get content ideas from. Chartr, Maps & Charts, and Information is Beautiful are three great ones to start with. Again, I would recommend creating an account separate from your personal one for a more curated feed and better work-life balance.
Using Facebook as a Digital PR
I rarely see Facebook mentioned as a tool for Digital PRs to use, but it can definitely be very beneficial. Local news Journalists are almost certainly monitoring local Facebook groups for stories, making them a great platform for getting your regional news stories in front of them. As with Reddit though, it’s not going to work if you’re obviously infiltrating the group to just promote your content.
Step 3: How to spy on your Digital PR competitors and use their content for inspiration
The third step that I use for finding the latest Digital PR news and resources is bookmarking the top blogs that regularly produce good content. Then each month I have a quick scan through my bookmarks folder for any good resources I may have missed from the previous steps.
You can follow the same formula for conducting regular competitor analysis and monitoring industry trends. First of all, identify sites in your sector that you know are producing regular content. Bookmark their blogs, and have a quick scan of new content they’re producing.
Whether you’re checking them weekly or monthly, this is a relatively quick task that can provide you with lots of relevant campaign inspiration to take into your brainstorms. Sharing this competitor analysis with clients can also be a great way of building trust and providing some added value.
To find competitors creating content on similar topics to you, I recommend subscribing to both The PR Insider and The Grapevine to discover which brands you should be paying extra attention to.
Using the search operators for alerts that I detailed in step 1, will also help you discover who the leading content creators that you’re competing with are.
How to find a competitor’s top-performing content
At this point, you can easily bookmark their blogs to monitor future content they upload. It’s a great idea to also analyse their website to find the top-performing historical content they’ve created.
There are a number of ways you can do this, but my go-to source is Ahrefs. Scroll down the sidebar on the left-hand side and you’ll see a report called “Best by links”, under “Pages”. This report shows you the most linked-to URLs for the domain/folder that you’re analysing.
In this report, you can either analyse the whole domain of the competitor you’re looking at or a specific folder of that domain. To find their top-performing content pages, I suggest putting the URL of their blog in. This will then just show you the most linked-to blog posts they’ve created (assuming all of their content sits within the same folder in the content’s URL, e.g. /blog/cool-piece-of-content).
Now you can use all of this data to create a list of content that has done well from a link-building point of view. This will help you to identify trends within the type of content that is performing the best, as well as which websites are regularly linking to this top-performing content that you can target with your content too.
And that’s how you can stay up to date with the latest trends and insights in any industry. If you want to stay ahead of the latest news and resources in Digital PR, you can sign up for The Digital PR Observer Newsletter. I’ve also created the Digital PR Library, which is a database of over 1,600 blog posts, podcasts, webinars and other resources related to every aspect of working in Digital PR.
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