How you can create a happy union between social media and PR
Any company that fails to see the marketing goldmine that social media has provided for public relations, needs to seriously re-think their digital marketing strategy. Social media and PR have very similar roles in that they both deal with positive brand awareness as well as a degree of reputation management.
Social media should not be your only form of public relations, but it should be used to enhance existing public awareness of your brand. A clever crossover of both roles is the only way to ensure consistency with your brands messaging and public communications.
Here are some tips on how to combine these two roles into the perfect public address union for your brand:
Staff adjustments
When someone new joins your company, an existing employee gets a promotion or there is a management shuffle, make an announcement via social media. Change often sparks speculation and this is how damaging rumours begin to spread. Get ahead of any negativity by immediately welcoming the change with a brief explanation of who the newcomer is and what they bring to your company, or why the company felt it necessary to shift or promote existing staff members.
Do this via a company newsletter and follow up with a less detailed announcement on social media. This is very important to ensure that unnecessary rumours don’t damage the public’s trust in your brand, which can be expensive to rebuild. This could also be used as an effective way to get more people to sign up to your newsletter to get the full story.
Event launches
Social media is perfect for new event launches and will spread the word faster, reaching a much wider audience than traditional media. However if your event is a product launch or business related, it is important to include an announcement in a press release as well as a blog post.
Include traditional media such as newspaper and radio ads which are being increasingly overlooked in favour of the “no-pay” mediums of advertising, but at the risk of excluding an entire demographic of people who are not as digitally connected as others.
New information accessibility
With the introduction of social media, public accessibility to case studies and research has become much easier and crucial in building a relationship between the public and a brand. Trust builds credibility, and when a company is not only transparent with their findings, but offers it for public consumption through social media, it can enhance their credibility exponentially if their offerings are of a consistently high standard, creating the holy grail of public relations which is to become the “go-to” experts in a particular field.
Shout outs
Take advantage of any mentions of your brand by others through the different forms of media. When a person or brand mentions you in a favourable light through any medium of media, then be sure to thank them and share what they have said on your own social media pages.
This is great PR and in fact some websites will have a page dedicated to links to articles or mentions in other publications (also great for SEO!). Be careful of a response if the mention is negative. This type of reputation management should be carefully handled by the company and should never be dealt with impulsively.
PR is brand management as a whole and tells an entire story to a wide audience, whereas social media tells snippets of the same story to specifically targeted audiences, inviting them to find out more and become involved in your brand. Recognising these fundamental differences is key to effectively merging the two.
