Here’s a number that looks great in a report: 4.2 million impressions. Here’s the number that’s harder to find: how many of those 4.2 million people felt anything. Reach tells you how far a message travelled. It doesn’t tell you whether it landed.

That gap, between distribution and resonance, is where sentiment analysis comes in. It won’t replace reach as a metric, but it asks a question that reach can’t answer: did this actually move anyone?

What reach doesn’t capture

Reach is easy to report on, which is probably why it became the default. A story placed in a publication with five million monthly readers? Five million impressions. Clean, simple, defensible.

But a story that reaches five million people and leaves them indifferent is a different outcome to one that reaches 50,000 people and prompts them to search, share, or buy. The number doesn’t distinguish between the two. Sentiment data at least tries to.

Where sentiment analysis is most useful

The obvious use case is crisis communications. When a brand is in trouble, coverage spikes and reach goes up, which looks almost absurd when reported alongside the actual situation. Sentiment data adds the context: not just how much people are talking, but what they’re saying and whether it’s getting worse.

It’s also useful in the quieter moments. A campaign that looks modest by reach standards might be building something more durable with a smaller, more influential audience. The kind of people whose opinions tend to travel further than their follower counts suggest. That’s easy to miss if reach is the only thing being tracked.

Building it into how you plan, not just how you report

Some teams are now writing briefs around a desired emotional outcome rather than a coverage target. Not “we want 50 pieces of coverage” but “we want our audience to associate this brand with credibility and warmth.” It’s a harder brief to write, but it tends to produce sharper decisions about angles, spokespeople, and timing.

The other benefit is a more honest feedback loop. Sentiment data will tell you when a message isn’t landing in the way you expected, which is more useful mid-campaign than finding out in a post-mortem.

A note on balance

None of this is an argument for ditching reach entirely. Distribution still matters. You need people to encounter your message before they can form any opinion of it. But reach and sentiment measure different things, and reporting only one of them leaves a gap.

If the goal of PR is to shape how people think and feel about a brand, then it’s worth having a metric that at least attempts to measure whether that’s happening. Reach tells you how many people you reached. Sentiment gives you a better shot at knowing whether it mattered.

At Briscoe PR, measurement sits at the centre of how we plan and report on campaigns. If you’re thinking about how to get more from your PR activity or want to understand whether your media relations is landing the way you intend, we’d be happy to have a conversation. Get in touch and let’s talk about what good measurement looks like for your brand.