Use Agility to discover journalists and influencers

How to use the "Discover" tab in Agility to search for people by subject, geography, and other criteria

Andrew Woodall avatar
Written by Andrew Woodall
Updated over a week ago

Agility's Discover tab allows you to search for people and/or outlets (otherwise known as publications), to create lists of contacts that you can then email your press release or message to. This article explains how to use the different available fields to better target your search.

You'll see three sections when searching for people:

  1. Search for People

  2. and working for outlets...

  3. then narrowed down by...

In the first section:

Writing about - You can enter keywords/subjects relating to the topic of your press release.

Type in your subject and if you see it in the drop down, select it. This will populate the field (see image 1 and 3). You can also click on the "View Subjects Related to" option, which will list suggested subjects and allow you to select several to complement your original chosen subject.

If you click into field, whether it has a subject or not, a "Browse All" option will appear. Click on this to see all of the available categories and subjects (see image 2 and 4 below)

As in image 4 below, when you find a subject you wish to use in your search, click on it to highlight, then click "Add" to move it to the "Selected Subjects" list. If you have a change of heart, you can click on a subject in the "Selected Subjects" list and "Remove" it the same way.

Note: If you click on "Browse All", it will list all the different categories Agility has to offer. Beside each category is a number in brackets, the number indicates the number of subjects within that category. Clicking on the category name or the arrow beside it, will show all available subjects.

You can click on more than one before clicking the Add button and it will move all of the selected subjects across to the Selected Subjects box.

Located in - The country/area in which you want to search for contacts, e.g. United Kingdom and France. Leaving this field blank will generate a global search.

With the job role - Search for a specific job role such as a blogger, editor, journalist etc. You can select Browse All if you want a list of all the job roles Agility has to offer.

Publishing in - This field is usually left blank unless you have a specific language requirement or if your required contacts/outlets are likely to publish in a language different to that spoken in the country they're located in. E.g. A magazine published in French but based in/publishing from London, UK.

In the second section:

Named: If you're looking for people working for a specific outlet, enter the outlet name here. For example, "Wall Street Journal."

Writing about: You can enter keywords/subjects relating to the topic of your press release. This will search the for outlets that cover these topics, as opposed to individual journalists themselves as in the first section.

In the format: Specify any particular outlet format that you wish to target, e.g. Magazine, Newspaper, Podcast.

Covering the area: This field covers the possibility of a journalist covering a geographic area that is different to their physical address.

In the third section:

Market sector: Specify a Market sector if you are looking for trade publications for a specific industry.

Media type: Specify exactly what media your contact works in i.e. Online, Print

News Focus: Who do you want to target? E.g. community, regional, International etc.

Target Audience: Specify a target audience if you are looking targeting outlets with a specific of target audience.

Publication frequency: E.g. daily, monthly, annually, online etc.

By leaving any of these options blank, the system will search for all of them.

Including blog outlets: If you want to add bloggers, tick this check box, which will increase your search results.

Now that we have entered our requirements, we can click on View Results.

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