Expert comments are without doubt one of the leading link building tactics that brands continue to experience success utilising as part of their Digital PR strategy. 

But finding the right expert for your campaign isn’t always easy, especially if you don’t have the right person already working in house at your brand or client. The go to first step for most working in Digital PR will be to put out a #journorequest on Twitter.

But a lot of times your #journorequest tweet won’t get the right responses, or any at all. And with more and more users leaving X, particularly in the marketing space, the chances of getting a great response to your tweet definitely feels as though it’s getting lower.

So what to do when you’re looking for an expert and you’re not fortunate enough to have one come directly to you?

In this post, I’ll run down eight steps you can take to find the perfect expert to add comments to your Digital PR campaigns.

1: Use LinkedIn to look in house first

Any time that you can use quotes from an expert in house, that should be the go to option over using external experts. Many companies will have people whose authority you can use for expert comments, in different departments that you’re probably not aware of. Researching if these people exist in house should be your first port of call.

Obviously the easiest way of finding this out will be to just ask your manager or point of contact with the client if they know someone that can be utilised. However, nobody will know everyone that works at a company, especially large ones. So you might need to do some digging of your own.

This is where LinkedIn can be a valuable resource for finding experts. Head over to LinkedIn and search for your company, then click on the people tab and start searching for relevant keywords. To ensure you only get results for people currently working at your company, filter the “Current Company” tab at the top of your search.

Then once you know who the right person might be, you or your client can get in touch with them and fingers crossed they’ll be able to help!

This is great for finding experts within teams that most companies will have, for example HR experts, PR experts, recruitment experts, etc. 

2: Check for experts from other clients

What’s better than earning links for one client? Earning links for two clients! 

If you’re working agency side, you’re in the fortunate position of having access to experts from your entire roster of clients. If you can’t find the right expert in house with your client, try and find them in house with a different client.

As long as they’re not a competitor, it’s unlikely that the other client will have an issue providing quotes that another brand can use, especially once you explain to them that they’ll be benefiting via all the coverage from a campaign that they aren’t even paying for!

It’s always a good idea to keep a shared document of all the experts you have access to at different clients. That way everyone in your Digital PR team can easily check this doc and potentially create opportunities for extra coverage, for not one but two clients!

3: Use ahrefs Content Explorer to find experts that news publications have covered before

ahrefs’ Content Explorer is a fantastic tool for any analysis relating to content that is being written about on the internet. The tool also has an extremely useful News filter that you can apply to any search which is very valuable for anyone working in Digital PR. 

Using this tool, you can search for coverage that has quoted the type of expert that you’re looking to feature in your campaign. For example, if you’re looking to use a body language expert in your campaign, you can search for “body language expert” in Content Explorer, and you’ll get a list of web pages that mention the term “body language expert”. 

At this point you’ve got a list of sites that mention the type of expert you’re looking for. By using the search filters we can then use the News filter to narrow our results down to just news publications. This helps us to find experts that we know are happy to be quoted in the media, and know what you’re trying to achieve from their quotes.

From your list of relevant news articles, start reading through them and see if any names consistently pop up. Then you can get in touch with them and hopefully be able to use their expertise for your campaign too!

If you have some specific sites that you’re looking to earn coverage on with your expert comments, you can also add, site: followed by the domain of the news publication you want to see news articles for. That way, you increase your chances of finding an expert that your target Journalist’s are more likely to be familiar with, and more likely to trust and value their insights.

For best results, I would recommend repeating this process with both Content Explorer and a manual Google search. Both will miss out or not display some results, so by using both search engines you’ll increase your chances of finding those really niche experts.

4: Use the People tab on Twitter

Most experts that are regularly looking for PR opportunities to get their own name out there, are likely to have Twitter profiles where they mention either their job title or the type of expert they are in within their Twitter bio.

Head to Twitter and search for keywords related to your chosen expert, then switch to the “People” tab, and you’ll find a list of Twitter profiles that match your search. Then, as you can see from the below screenshot, you’ll get a list of users that are calling themselves a body language expert in their bio.

Finally, start working your way through these profiles to see if they look legit, and then get in touch with them to see if they can help!

This also works for other social media apps too, for example, LinkedIn, Threads, TikTok, or Instagram. 

5: Look at other people’s Journo Requests

If you search for the type of expert that you’re looking for, along with the #journorequest hashtag, you’ll find a list of previous requests that people have made similar to yours.

Scroll down the posts and look for ones that have replies to them. Often, experts will reply to the original request tweet. By clicking on the replies, you might discover the exact person you’re looking for, or a fellow PR that has access to your desired expert.

6: Try to find the expert a Journalist found and used via #journorequest

This one is basically a combination of points three and five. As you’re looking through the list of similar #journorequest tweets, you might notice Journalists also trying to source the same type of expert that you are. Just because an expert didn’t reply to their tweet, obviously doesn’t mean that they didn’t find one.

At this stage, you know the name of the Journalist that was looking for, let's say a relationship expert. And you can probably also work out the site that they write for. Now, as we went through in point three, we can try to search for that article, either on Google or using Content Explorer, but this time by also including the name of the author to hopefully narrow our search results down to exactly what we’re looking for.

7: Press Loft

Press Loft has launched a new tool that is a database of media friendly experts ready to be used to provide quotes to be used in PR campaigns. You can access the database at https://www.pressloft.com/app/profile/experts/search.

The tool is still relatively new at the time of writing this post, but there’s a good number of experts already available in the database that I’m sure will continue to expand. There are also some useful filters to help you filter your search results by tags such as country, gender, and how senior at their company they are.

8: ResponseSource

ResponseSource has a number of blog posts where they round up a list of experts in different industries that are available for press comments. You can view the posts at https://www.responsesource.com/blog/category/experts/. 

Like Press Loft, this can be a great starting point for proactively hunting down experts that you have the benefit of knowing that they’re definitely available to provide comments, and presumably understand what both you and Journalist’s will be looking for out of them.

Looking to make expert commentary a more prominent feature of your Digital PR activity? Check out our Digital PR Library full of learning resources to help you become a Digital PR expert.