4 Free tools every social journalist needs to understand audiences

To publish a post or not publish? That’s one tricky question. Probably, the best answer there is to it is: it depends on your audience. Understanding what our readership wants can sometimes get more difficult and exhausting than comprehending what we want for ourselves. 

When it comes to social media platforms, creating engagement and building a tight community, there’s one question that serves as guidance: what is the public is asking for? Maybe our audience wants information – the latest news, expert’s opinions, and innovative graphics. Or maybe you have a different public that does not want that at all.

There’s no such thing as a homogenous mass of people called audience. This is why niches exist. Luckily, there are multiple applications out there that can give us a clue on what the public we’re intending to write for might want. 

Here’s a toolkit of free social media management apps brought to you by the Interhacktives team.

Google Search Console

Formerly known as Google Webmaster Tool, Google Search Console is one of the most diverse tools out there to understand our site’s performance. It gives you the possibility to monitor and optimise a site’s presence in the search engine and includes analytics related to user queries, impressions, search results, pages, and more.

GSC allows you to monitor a page’s performance, inspect URLs and filter the data by time and country. It also offers to export all the data so you can make further analysis and reports.

Crowdtangle

Crowdtangle is probably one of the easiest and handiest social media tools available. It offers the possibility to incorporate an incredibly functional Google Chrome extension that shows the performance of a post on several social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram). It also mentions what other accounts or brands have replicated the content and shared it with their audiences – so you’ll know if the conversation about your post kept going.

The app also has a dashboard version that shows successful content from different publishers in real-time, identifies influencers, and sets “viral alerts”.

Followerwonk

This app is great for devising a Twitter strategy since it allows you to compare your account users with your competitors. It also offers the possibility to rank your followers according to their level of influence and assess them based on the engagement rate they have.

Answer the public

Answer the public is a keyword tool that gives insight into what our potential audience is searching for. This is particularly useful when we feel we ran out of angles to a specific story, as it shows what questions users are asking in search engines.

Take a look at the example below – As soon as you open the Answer the Public page, you can type the topic you want to search. In this case, we typed coronavirus. Here are some of the questions that people are already asking about the pandemic. Very useful, isn’t it?