Nearly all of PR professionals surveyed in a recent poll find their social media monitoring capabilities lacking. A recent Kantar Media and Press Index poll was the first survey opinions on media monitoring within the European communications sector. The survey polled 240 PR professionals from 160 PR agencies in the UK, France, Italy and Spain.

The results were determined by the use of social media in the locations studied. In France and Italy, there is less penetration of Twitter use than in Spain and the UK. Accordingly, respondents from Britain and Spain find that they are less equipped to monitor media than their French and Italian correspondents. This is likely due to the difficulty in monitoring social media sites like Twitter, a difficulty that increases with a higher percentage of use as in the UK and Spain.

Alongside this, over half of respondents from all four countries said they were unsure of the reliability of their social media monitoring capabilities. Another consensus emerged when asked about the medium through which agencies monitor news. Google was the obvious leader for media monitoring, but most agencies turned to a specialised media monitoring service to complement Google.

Throughout the survey, Spain and the UK tended to agree on social media and monitoring services, and France and Italy did likewise. However, when asked if they used a specialist analytics agency, most agencies in the UK and Italy responded no while nearly half of French and Spanish respondents said yes.