22 PR Tools From the #PRstack Community

By Stephen Waddington

In the past 12 months, the #PRstack community has created an app that has characterized more than 250 third-party tools.

It has published 48 how-to guides written by more than 35 community members covering different areas of the public relations workflow.

A lively community has developed and grown on Facebook and Twitter.

The community has developed a list of its favorite 22 PR tools for Spin Sucks.

The 22 PR Tools From the #PRstack Community

1. Anewstip. Anewstip is a simple tool to quickly find relevant journalists to pitch your stories to on Twitter. Unlike other PR tools, it doesn’t just compile a list of publications based on industry, or give numbers of retweets and mentions. — Lauren Old
   
2. Canva. Content needs to capture imaginations, with visuals to tell the story. Canva is an online tool you can use to create visuals for content including blog posts, social posts, and even covers for proposals. The free option offers basic access to images, icons, and fonts or there is an option to upgrade. — Laura Sutherland
   
3. FlipBoard. Flipboard allows you to cover many social platforms for sharing and posting information. It helps put all the important information from all of your separate social media apps into one place. Just as good to use on your spare time as well as for productivity/media engagement. — Matthew Martin
   
4. Google Analytics Spreadsheet Add-on. Google Analytics data is among the most valuable for tracking PR outcomes. This add-on imports it automatically to Google Sheets. From there, you can juggle the data, put it alongside other info, as you wish, and then export the feed elsewhere. — Max Tatton-Brown
   
5. Hemmingway. Ernest Hemmingway said if often took him a morning to simplify his writing. Now you can do it at the push of a button. Simply paste content or write direct into the browser and the Hemmingway mobile or web app will highlights abuse of grammar and protected language. — Sarah Hall
6. IFTTT. If This, Then That (IFTTT) is a free-to-access network that puts the Internet to work for you. It creates simple connections between the products you use every day. It automates web tasks using so-called recipes, which transposes data and insight and cuts out many arduous manual tasks. — Andy Ross
7. Image Color Picker. Need to create images quickly using your clients’ brand guidelines, but don’t know their HEX or RGB color codes? Use this extraction tool to grab colors from any website. Then use Canva to create Facebook, Tumblr, or Twitter posts in your clients’ colors. — Scott Guthrie
8. Import.IO. Import.io is a website scraping tool that can quickly turn webpages into juicy data. It has a number of integrations into other PR tools, including Tableau, Google Sheets, and Plot.ly. In PR, it can prove useful for monitoring across selected news sites and for quickly gathering data for manipulation. — Michael White
9. Legend App. A simple tool for creating fast animated social content. It easily combines a new or library image with a moving text overlay and has great range of design and animation options and posts as video or GIF straight to your main social channels. — Matt Appleby
10. Moldiv. A picture editing app which allows you to combine and edit photos into a collage. It’s particularly useful when you want to share several images at once and thus sidesteps Twitter’s four photo limit. It’s also useful for creating a graphic of text and images quickly from a mobile device. — Liz Bridgen
11. Monitor Backlinks. Tracking SEO in your client’s market is a hassle using free PR tools. This paid-for version gives you all the data under one dead-easy-to-understand roof. Check your keyword rankings and see how your competitors are getting their backlinks. Plan your PR/SEO campaign accordingly. You can try it free for 30 days. — David Sawyer
12. Pablo 2.0 by Buffer. Social media scheduling and analytics platform, Buffer, launched Pablo 2.0, a social image creator. Pablo lets you create engaging images that fit perfectly to all social platforms quickly and without the need for photoshop skills. A great tool to design and share visual content with minimal fuss. — Angharad Welsh
13. Pingdom. Pingdom is an established web monitoring tool that advises on genuine website downtime and problems with marketing redirects rather than focusing on user-based IT issues. Covers basic broken links in content right through to deeper level issues and highlights potential causes with useful, accessible data. Free and paid for options for more frequent checks. — Abha Thakor
14. Placeit. Placeit allows you to showcase designs, logos, or websites in a stunning way. Create photos or video mockups to see what they’d look like on any device. It’s easy to use, requiring just a screenshot or URL. Low-res images are free and higher quality mockups are a small fee. — Rachel Miller
15. Prowly. Prowly is a CRM tool that allows you to adapt new PR trends into your strategies. It helps to create brand owned media such as newsrooms or magazines, build a knowledge about the audience, create SEO-friendly stories, and build personalized e-mails to journalists and opinion leaders. — Joanna Drabent
16. Quintly. Want to benchmark your own social media performance with your competitors? Quintly has the data and produces awesome graphic reports on a stunning variety of KPIs. Plus you will get Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Youtube, Google+, and even LinkedIn in one place, thanks to German engineering. — Fred Tautz
17. Similarweb. Looking for some influencers to play with and don’t want to go with the usual set? Don’t have big bucks because it’s still a pitch? Just run the usual suspects through Similarweb and immediately see who they are influenced by, who they influence, and who your target audience also likes. This usually gives you some good ideas on who to approach. — Fred Tautz
18. SentiStrength. Sentistrength is a text sentiment checker and opinion miner. It’s been created by a group of academics and is hosted by the University of Wolverhampton. I have used it a couple of times to analyze Tweets and found it to be more accurate than paid-for enterprise solutions. And it’s free. — Michael Blowers
19. Smartsheet. Smartsheet is an easier version of Google Docs and is ideal for real-time collaboration projects or ongoing file sharing. Imagine having all notes, discussions, files, and information in one location accessible across any browser, device, and operating system that streamlines communication, empowers teams, and drives efficiencies. Tip: Particularly useful when sharing content calendars. — Maria Loupa
20. Tool Google Analytics. Still finding more gems in Google Analytics, particularly how to integrate online and offline analysis. The spreadsheet add-on in particular helps to create helpful insights for improving campaigns. — Sally Keith
21. WordPress. WordPress is a platform that any PR practitioner or student can use to build an online portfolio for themselves, to either showcase their own skills, interests and knowledge or their business’. There are a wide variety of themes available to suit photography- or word-based blogs. — Livi Wilkes
22. LeadPages. I am in love with LeadPages for PR pros. It takes the wait time out of designing a landing page for your content. No longer do you have to go to your design or web person and have them build you a landing page every time you want to put content behind a wall. You can easily design a page and, with a WordPress plugin, insert it into your website in seconds. — Gini Dietrich

 So there you have it: Twenty-two PR tools for you to test, set-up, and use in 2016.