The Benefits of Social Media to a PR campaign
Research shows that 4.62 billion people use social media – and there is no denying the power and growth social media holds. It influences people’s decisions, opinions and mindsets.
A wide spectrum of individuals uses social media, whether that’s to communicate with family and friends, for entertainment, or both. And so, utilising social media to run alongside your PR campaign makes sense to support your overall business strategy.
PR campaigns focus on writing from an industry perspective. However, social media has created new forms of PR and ways for businesses to showcase their expertise to their audiences. Hashtags, for example, within social media allow content to go further than just your ‘regular targets’ and allow organisations to reach new potential audiences.
Social media within a PR campaign also means you can make your campaign more visual. Whilst reading an article is insightful and educational, implementing the creativity that stems from social media usage makes you seem more engaging, personal and modern – from infographics to GIFs or video content.
New Insights
Social media is a great way to understand what your audience is interested in, what they want, and what they like to read.
Most social media platforms have an analytics platform for company pages which show a breakdown of the posts that did well, versus the ones that perhaps didn’t gain as much traction over your chosen period. From this, organisations can evaluate and adapt their social media strategy based on the data to develop their presence further.
But what should organisations look out for when it comes to evaluating the data from an analytics page?
- Engagement: Monitoring the engagement of each post is a good indication of how to progress upcoming posts you have and the style you go for with your social media presence.
- Likes: Measuring the number of likes you receive on a post will help to determine what type of content is more well-received on social media.
- Shares: Monitoring the number of times your post is shared will not only tell you that your audience finds it useful; but also show you that they think your content will educate their own network.
Keeping Up With The Times
Finally, implementing social media in your PR campaign allows you to stay on top of trends and improve your organisation’s profile. Using platforms such as Twitter gives organisations a voice to express opinions on a topic in a shorter form, with the potential to reach audiences it perhaps wouldn’t via usual industry publishing websites.
LinkedIn is all about professional connections and can be considered a key player in attracting other businesses to your ideas and products. Being in the B2B (Business to Business) industry, it makes sense for organisations to utilise this platform to their advantage.
Facebook, is the ‘OG’ social media platform, statistics show there were over 48.5 million Facebook users in the UK in July 2021, and therefore, having a Facebook presence is important. However, with new platforms becoming seemingly more popular such as Instagram and TikTok, it’s time organisations looked even further into the social media landscape and got a head start on their competitors who perhaps haven’t delved into the many platforms available to them now.
Additionally, social media platforms offer businesses the opportunity to go ‘live’, where they can video stream from wherever they are in the world to a real-time audience. Organisations should utilise this to engage their social media audience with their PR strategies in a completely different way.
The Best Approach
Combining all of these approaches within your social media strategy will give organisations the opportunity to reach new potentials within their PR campaigns, and attract new audiences they might not reach through traditional PR processes.
It’s clear to say that social media has boomed over the years, and influences our lives in more ways than we can think. It has become more than a place to message your friends and communicate with family. Utilising the basic platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook is just the beginning of unlocking a new avenue in a PR campaign. If organisations maximise the social media platforms available to them, they could reach potentials they never knew existed.
If your business needs social media support, or would be keen to add a social media strategy within your Public Relations mix, get in touch with us at prworks@neopr.co.uk
