But did you know social networking can also help with your PR campaign? Used in conjunction with other PR activities, social media can really boost your efforts in terms of connecting with journalists and generating media coverage.
Get social on social media
The problem is, if you’re not careful, it can also be a massive drain on your time. Like when you log on to Facebook for a quick browse of your timeline, and hours later you’ve scrolled through 89 photos of your best friend’s brother’s neighbour’s honeymoon and taken a test to see what kind of film character you’re most like, without actually doing anything, you know, productive.
While social media has many advantages, it can also take you away from what you’re meant to be doing.
So here are my top tips for using social media in your PR campaign, without wasting your time.
1. Interact with journalists
Use social media to interact with journalists, editors, bloggers – anyone you want to connect with from a PR perspecitve
2. Showcase your successes
Utilise social media to showcase your PR success. Whenever you get media coverage in newspapers and magazines, post links to the article on your social media networks. And then shout about it!
3. Use social media management tools
Don’t waste time on social media. Instead, try a tool like Hootsuite, which allows you to monitor, engage and measure your social media networks in one place. Use it to schedule messages to be sent out across various platforms. Also look at Buffer, which allows you to click on interesting articles, videos or images whilst surfing the net, and automatically share them with your networks throughout the day.
4. But interact in ‘real time’ too
Scheduling posts shouldn’t replace actually interacting with people online – you should generally aim to do both.
5. Consider your Facebook strategy
In terms of scheduling posts for Facebook, you may want to think about the the effect third-party apps could have on your Edgerank (the algorithm Facebook uses to decide how many people see your status updates). Try different things such as posting text with no links or posting links with no preview, to see what works best for you.
6. Monitor your activity
Check your ‘Facebook Insights’ and if you’re using Hootsite read their analytics report to see which posts are performing best. You can also check Google Analytics for your website to see where your traffic is coming from.
Do you have questions or comments on using social media for PR? Leave a comment below and let us know.
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