How can PR & Social Media combine to grow your brand and business?
PR and Social Media are both built on communication. Social media amplifies your brand’s message and makes your PR efforts more impactful. Social media offers content sharing via news releases, emails, and other PR-related channels to live longer, circulate more quickly, and reach further.
Public relations develops the story, and Social Media broadcasts it. PR is centered on helping organizations find their story; it’s about helping brands figure out what they want to say and to whom. With the help of social media, these stories are given a platform and distributed widely to consumers.
Social media is a tool for PR professionals, supplementing press releases and briefings to spread information to a wider audience. The practice of public relations has evolved to embrace social media strategy, influencer marketing, and crisis management.
What is Social Media?
Social media is how individuals & brands communicate with one another or the masses by creating, sharing, and exchanging information and ideas in online communities and networks.
Social media has given brands and individuals a platform through which they can collaborate their innovations, ideas, achievements, and messages with the masses. A platform that is instant in its reach and dynamic enough to garner a response quickly. Brands can become a part of their customer’s life through social media. Brands can build reputation and rapport by providing entertainment, information, support, and tips for effectively living. Thanks to social media, the word “advertising” has taken a new dimension altogether.
Social Media has become the priority source of entertainment and updates and also is THE place to communicate whether it is personal or conveying to a community. This calls for a major online reputation management for any business, brand or even an individual. The distinctions between personal and professional life are relatively blurred online, and we frequently refer to our online identity as “Personal Brand”. Both the personal and professional “online YOU” can be your personal brand. Even Brands/Businesses today prefer a very casual approach where they post relevant memes(jokes) and many other entertaining ways to reach out to their followers or audience present online. Social Media is totally the ‘Game of Trends’ and one should be updated of what’s going on around the world to cope & compete with the competitors.
Creative ways to combine Social Media and PR to create brand awareness.
Public relations’ main goal is to increase your business’s media presence. Social media offers a platform for tremendous outreach and brand exposure in various creative ways.
It is no secret that public relations has advanced beyond press releases and conventional media. Think about how social media is the primary way millennials and the younger generation get news. Recent social media data shows that more than 50% of customers follow businesses on social media directly to stay informed about them.
Aligning social media and PR enables you to enhance positive mentions and keep customers informed about anything from new goods and corporate milestones to marketing campaigns.
Here are a few ways to enhance your social media presence.
1. Become a guest blogger or contributor.
This idea is straightforward: publish content to well-known industry blogs to gain exposure and authority. A tried-and-true example of new-school PR is guest blogging. Most blogs always look for new content, so a well-written proposal can frequently open the door for you.
Three benefits come from guest blogging:
- You can access a larger audience than your own. You can engage new clients and network with key players in the field.
- You gain from the authority of the blog you’re writing on (ask yourself whether your website has any “featured in” snippets or testimonials).
- You may occasionally be able to gain backlinks or substantial traffic depending on the type of blog you’re posting.
By posting to the blog, contributors increase their authority and receive a byline summary snippet and a link to their company’s website. Creating intelligent pitches and interesting content for readers is necessary for guest writing.
Once an item is published, you can endorse it and spread the word. This is a classic and effective method to combine the use of PR and Social Media.
2. Request that your staff members, especially C-level personnel, publish on LinkedIn.
Remember that garnering media attention in today’s PR doesn’t just mean appearing in magazines. Utilizing social media is the ideal way to engage the “public” aspect of Public Relations. For instance, many business-to-business (B2B) organizations use LinkedIn to publicize company milestones and new offerings. Particularly, those in leadership roles and C-level positions frequently have a lot of influence on LinkedIn. A personal account tends to receive a much greater reach than a standard branded post and helps your news feel more personable.
The beauty of PR and Social Media is that you can directly address your target demographic and communities. The more internal influencers you have singing your company’s praises, the better.
3. Encourage influencers to promote your brand.
Influencer marketing is arguably the most inventive way to strengthen social media PR efforts.
Getting your items in front of influencers is a terrific approach for B2C businesses to get the word out about their offerings. The possibilities for interacting with influencers appear limitless, whether through gifts in exchange for reviews or full-on paid sponsorships. Remember that an “influencer” can take many forms, particularly with micro-influencers growth.
Although well-known businesses may collaborate with well-known people, emerging brands can collaborate with large and small content producers. Numbers indicating “Following counts” are significant but less so than engagement and buzz.
4. Establish an ambassador program to create an army of supporters.
An ambassador program is essentially a more robust kind of influencer marketing, basically guaranteeing you constant social media PR. Companies frequently trust and vet ambassadors. Ambassadors promote your company and its most recent products in return for a commission, free merchandise, or other benefits. If you’re selling a high-quality item, brand ambassadors will promote it on their dime.
Customers swarm to websites and platforms like Instagram and Pinterest to discover new products. Prospects are far more likely to make a purchase when they discover a horde of happy consumers praising your business.
5. Use Twitter to communicate with journalists and publishers
Journalists are the first community that comes to mind when considering “coverage” for our products or company. While contacting journalists is entirely acceptable, the fundamental guidelines of proper social media involvement and etiquette still apply in this situation. Take the time to learn about journalists’ interests, publications, and articles before cold-contacting them on Twitter. Some easy techniques to increase trust include:
- Tweeting about their writings (and @mentioning them)
- Be helpful by providing some suggestions rather than oneself as a source when they ask for sources.
- Avoid having a relationship with them that is solely promotional and engage them in conversation instead.
Additionally, #HARO (“help a reporter out”) and #JournoRequest are excellent hashtags to use to discover journalists looking for sources for stories.
6. Strengthen your press release approach with social media
Perhaps one of the simplest social media and PR combinations is news circulation. Social media is some businesses’ main platform for breaking news or product announcements. In addition to posting links on LinkedIn or Twitter, take into account alternative formatting suggestions like:
- Using your caption to summarize the main elements of your press release
- Including a “condensed” release or bullet points with your external link
- Creating an infographic or visual from your release
7. Create a social media crisis strategy to keep upbeat during a setback.
Bad news quickly spreads on social media. Responding with prudence is essential to maintain credibility and reassure your clients when faced with a barrage of critical remarks and calls. Crisis management is a critical service offered by reputed PR firms. Remember that even well-known brands receive negative attention and must undertake corrective measures employing PR services. The best PR firms understand the importance of social media in crisis management. A social media crisis plan is essential to understand this need for damage control. You should always be ready for the worst situation, and preparing a crisis management strategy can help you deal with events that might garner negative attention.
8. Use #Hashtags to support your PR campaigns.
Creating a hashtag campaign is a genius approach to keep track of talks about your company’s PR initiatives and solidify your brand identification. When used properly, hashtags are catchy and simple for your audience to remember.
Think about how you can use hashtags to pair your efforts to:
- Create a sense of camaraderie among your clients.
- Help a worthy cause.
- Showcase the accomplishments or milestones for your firm.
- Share inspiring, uplifting tales about the company.
- Demonstrate your support for sustainability.
9. Be sure to interact with your target audience and establish bonds.
Remember that interacting with your clients on social media is a straightforward way to gain positive press for yourself. Most interactions with followers are public and visible to everyone.
And in that sense, you create buzz by using those shoutouts and Retweets to encourage more uplifting conversations about your brand.
- You’d be shocked at how you may turn a negative connection into something great by responding to questions, remarks, and complaints.
- Regularly Retweet those that laud you in their tweets (including success stories and testimonials)
- Ask questions and formally invite participation: People want to speak up, so offer them the opportunity to do so.
- Remember that this situation requires a quick response on social media. You don’t want to leave someone hanging or risk missing out on a positive review from a grateful client or influential person.
Today’s PR efforts go beyond cold emailing and distributing press releases. Even a small amount of imagination may make a huge difference in your social media and PR approach. You can take numerous doable actions to produce more favorable publicity, from influencers and guest pieces to merely reconsidering how you promote yourself on social media.
Conclusion:
Going forward, Social media landscape will continue to evolve giving brands and businesses ample opportunities to maximize their reach. Strategic and holistic use of social media and PR opens new areas of outreach and strengthens customer relations. In this ever-changing and dynamic digital era, forgoing the use of social media in your PR activities is akin to conceding market share to your competitors.