How to Make Social Media Your Ultimate PR Weapon
Just as the internet has fundamentally changed the nature of marketing in a mere two decades, it has also completely upended the world of public relations.
Before the internet, a well-connected and competent PR agent was essentially the gatekeeper to the media; he or she had his or her own connections and could literally shape the news. However, in an era where all of those journalists now have Twitter and Facebook accounts and services like PRWeb and Vocus make getting a press release into the hands of the right publications and journalists literally a matter of pressing a button, the power of PR is now something anyone can harness. And social media is a particularly powerful tool when used smartly
However, using social media to wage your own PR campaign does take a fair deal of know-how and strategy. Here are three ways in which social media can improve your PR reach.
- Optimize Press Releases for Social Sharing
Traditionally, press releases go out to journalists and editors via their email inboxes. It’s no secret that for an email or press release to stand out in a journalist’s inbox, it better have an amazingly compelling subject line for it even to get clicked upon. However, with journalists using social networks like Twitter and Facebook to find stories, share your press releases on those networks so that you’re essentially meeting journalists where they spend their time online. This way, the press release appears naturally in the journalist’s feed and he or she might even be more inclined to report on it since he or she essentially “found” it first, and wasn’t simply sent it.
- Stay Ahead of Any Potential Scandals
Let’s say you put out a press release for an incredibly important new product and it contains a typo in which the word “shot” is misspelled with another particular vowel. While issuing a public apology is a no-brainer, these can often take a few hours to write, get approved, and then get picked up by news outlets. Whereas with the power of social media, you can immediately hop on your social platforms and jump on that grenade before it even goes off. Also, social is a fantastic way to communicate with customers and to address any potential concerns or issues they might have. You might even become aware of a PR issue that you didn’t even know existed in the first place.
- Make Your CEO More Accessible
In today’s age of the in-touch, hands-on CEO’s, it never hurts to have your company’s main executives engaging with professional colleagues or customers in person or on the phone. Social media now allows executives to do this via such services as LinkedIn where an executive can publish a blog article or a press announcement that’s targeted at your desired audience. Whereas in the past, executives would write that piece for an industry journal, LinkedIn is a much faster and efficient way to reach an audience that is eager to read content coming from your company’s upper management.
