Over the past few years, social media has had a great impact on almost every industry. The same goes for the PR industry as well. Social media has a profound impact on brand awareness and ultimately gaining the media’s attention.
Studies show that 81% of PR professionals and 78% of journalists agree that they can no longer do their job without leveraging social media. Social media has the power to impact the minds of millions of people and gain a good brand reputation in their eyes.
In this brief guide, let’s find out how you can effectively use social media for building public relations.
1. Find Niche Influencers
Influencers are one of the most popular and profitable ways to gain visibility among the social media audience. No wonder, most top businesses today rave about influencer marketing. Some even go as far as to collaborate with thousands of influencers for their campaigns and product launches.
Influencers can be super-helpful for gaining good PR and brand awareness for your company. This is because influencers have worked towards gaining a massive following through years of hard work and building trust. Influencers have the power to change the minds of their followers because of the loyalty they have earned from their audience.
Hence, you should consider picking niche-influencers whose audience coincides with your target buyer persona. Picking niche influencers will cost you less, be more effective, and will yield you the most ROI.
If such niche influencers genuinely promote your products or services amongst their audience, you’ll see a huge increase in your lead generation rate, conversions, and brand awareness.
Using influencer marketing, your brand will be introduced to a whole new set of audiences and thus you’ll ultimately end up gaining good PR.
2. Engage and Interact with Journalists
Just like social media is a great medium to engage your prospects and customers, it also works great for interacting with journalists. Especially platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter are great for building strong relationships with journalists.
Of course, engaging doesn’t mean spamming their comments with promotional links, asking for favors like promoting or trying out your products, etc. You shouldn’t simply spam their DMs with messages asking them to promote your brand. Why would they?
Just as your leads want a two-way relationship with you, the same goes for journalists too. You need to build strong, valuable relationships with journalists on social media platforms. Help them out with their queries, interact with them on their posts, offer genuine compliments, and engage with them frequently. You can also share their posts or articles by tagging them.
You can do the same with multiple journalists. Over time, you will have created strong relationships with a bunch of journalists. This will help you gain good PR and increased brand awareness over time.
You would be required to engage and interact with journalists on various social media channels. Due to this, managing all the data about journalists can be quite challenging, and over time everything may go haywire.
Hence, using a powerful Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool such as SuperOffice can be extremely beneficial for building strong relationships with journalists on various social media platforms. SuperOffice will help you organize all the journalists’ data at a common portal. You and your team can pull up this data just with the click of a button.
A CRM tool can help you have personalized and frequent engagements with the journalists. Over time, you’ll be able to build a strong network of journalists who will be ready to cover you when you launch your next product.
3. Have your Leaders Post on LinkedIn and Twitter
LinkedIn and Twitter can be excellent platforms to gain more visibility. By having your company leaders posting content that promotes thought leadership, your brand can become a well-known name in the industry.
LinkedIn and Twitter are full of top industry leaders, media people, and influencers. Hence, if your leaders create consistent, high-quality posts on these platforms, there is a high chance of getting noticed and featured by many such people.
LinkedIn Publisher especially comes in useful here. It allows the creative freedom to produce thought-provoking content while gaining visibility through hashtags and LinkedIn groups. Your company leaders can post on these social media platforms either through your company page or their personal accounts.
4. Create Social Campaigns for Customer Success Stories
Celebrating your success is a vital part of gaining good PR. And, what better way to celebrate your success than to create social media campaigns around your customer success stories.
Every customer’s win is ultimately your win. Your leads and the media are not interested in your product features. At the end of the day, they want to see tangible, real, and fruitful results. And customer success stories are the best way to showcase these results. They are the greatest form of social proof.
Employ a dedicated customer success manager to ensure that you help your customers achieve results. And, once you have got results for your customers, create content around it. You can create content in the form of case studies, testimonials, and videos. Videos perform best for gaining increased visibility.
Promote these content that showcases customer success stories on social media channels. Go all-in on the storytelling part of it because stories are loved by everyone. These stories will gain more attention from your target audience and media, more than any other type of content.
Over to you
Now you know the power that social media has on your company’s PR. If you haven’t been leveraging social media for PR then you have already lost out on a lot. So, wait no further. Start today. Use these tips and techniques to attract the right kind of attention to your brand on social media, and see a great improvement in your public relations over time.
