Guide How to Use Social Media For Effective PR Campaign

Social media and PR departments make two different departments in every larger organization, but they can actually support and augment each other’s activities. Clever entrepreneurs should always look for ways to combine the two aspects of business and give their marketing strategies a fresh boost.

By THOMAS LANIGAN

But how can you use social media for effective PR campaigns? It’s a step-by-step process with numerous parameters included, so keep reading to learn the seven major techniques.

1. Adjust Your Style to Suit the PR Image

By definition, PR represents the professional maintenance of a favorable public image by a company or other organization. Your PR team is nurturing a very specific image about the company and you should think about it before you begin publishing content on social platforms.

The goal of social media marketing is to reflect the overall style and personality of the brand. Although the content itself is supposed to be a bit more relaxed, you shouldn’t do anything that doesn’t fit the company’s PR image.

2. Go Where Your Customers Are

It’s easy to say you should use social media in PR, but there are literally dozens of social platforms out there. Which ones should you focus on?

The answer is simple – go where your customers are.

Let’s say you are running a B2B company and targeting senior managers, executives, and decision-makers. This means you can pretty much neglect traditional B2C networks such as Instagram or TikTok and concentrate on LinkedIn and Twitter primarily.

These two platforms attract the vast majority of B2B professionals and you will probably find the target audience over there. That way, you don’t have to waste the budget and time on more or less irrelevant campaigns.

3. Show Your Faces

Do you want customers to treat you like an alienated organization or a real person? We bet the latter is true, so you better be ready to show the faces of your team members. It’s the easiest way to build genuine relationships with the fans and prove there are some real people behind the brand.

For example, you can publish “behind the scenes” content from time to time and allow followers to take a glimpse of your internal operations. You can also invite employees to share work-related stories or even organize live Q/A sessions where fans can post all sorts of comments and questions.

4. Use Hashtags to Raise Awareness

You probably know that hashtags are a critical component of social media marketing, which means you ought to use them for awareness-raising activities. Keep in mind that you must use two types of hashtags:

— Generic hashtags popular in your niche (like #physics or #chemistry for science topics)

— Branded hashtags that clearly reveal and promote your company

Besides that, you have to utilize hashtag research tools because they guarantee to discover the best and most relevant solutions in any given moment. Our favorite hashtag research platforms include Hashtagify and Keyhole.

5. Make a Versatile Content Strategy

PR-oriented social media campaigns are very focused and goal-driven, but it doesn’t mean you should create the same sort of content time and again. On the contrary, the point is to make a versatile content strategy and keep the audience on the edge of their seats.

After all, social networks give you so many content opportunities. There are textual posts, images with an without captions, videos, live streaming, infographics, memes, GIFs, quotes, and many other formats you can use to diversify content and take the PR campaign to the higher level.

You can also mix different styles and publish posts that are:

• Educational
• Inspirational
• Informative
• Conversational
• Controversial
• Entertaining

6. Hire Influencers

If you don’t have a large fan base but want to raise brand awareness quickly, hiring social influencers is probably the best thing you can do. What is the benefit of influencer marketing on social media?

First of all, they guarantee to give you additional exposure and introduce the business to the new audience group. Secondly, their followers are often very loyal and highly engaged, so you can expect to drive a lot more conversions in the coming days and weeks.

7. Consistency Is Vital

Finally, don’t forget that social media marketing is not a one-time thing. It is vital to keep the same level of enthusiasm in the long run if you want to generate the desired results because the social media universe is literally crowded.

For example, users publish a staggering 350 million images daily on Facebook alone. Our advice is to create a content calendar and post at least one piece of content every day – it will help you stand out among other publishers.

The Bottom Line

PR and social media are not the same things, but they can definitely help and supplement each other. In this post, we showed you a quick guide on how to use social media for effective PR campaigns.

Have you ever used social networking for PR purposes? Feel free to share your experiences in the comments – we would love to see how it turned out for you!

Thomas Lanigan is a digital marketer and a blogger at the dissertation help agency. He is mainly interested in social networking, online advertising, email campaigns, and marketing automation tools. Apart from writing, Thomas loves travelling and meeting new people and cultures.