Social media has dramatically changed the way we communicate and provided us with untraditional ways to deliver our message. PR is arguably one of the main disciplines that can benefit from the various opportunities offered by social media. Here is how:
Create Content for a Wider Coverage
Social media is where traditional PR tools are transformed into new formats of interactive content. A press release, PR’s main communication tool for decades, can be turned into a video, a presentation, or a series of tweets and status updates. Thanks to the instant and widespread nature of social media, PR profs can nowadays deliver news and content using different formats across multiple social channels. This enables you to reach a larger audience, resulting in a wider coverage of your news and ensuring it reaches a larger target group.
Your Broadcast Channel at Events
Events are another area where social media can be optimally used by PR profs. Using social media in PR connects between your activities on the ground and your virtual community. Be it a conference, a trade fair or a client’s’ event, social media can be used throughout the different phases of the event from planning to execution and thereafter. Twitter is one of the major social media platforms that provide you with an instant and easy way to communicate with your audience from announcing your participation and booth details, promoting your competitions and prizes to sending images and live updates. Monitoring the event hashtag can be an effective way in identifying companies and individuals at the event which makes networking a lot easier. All you need to do is check that person’s Twitter account and you will have enough basic information to engage with them virtually and in real life.
Enhance Your Brand Awareness
Being active on social media helps improve your brand perception and the overall image of your business. Publishing relevant news about your company, blogging about topics that matter to your audience and sharing that on social media helps in keeping yourself in front of your current customers and attract new ones. When you establish an online presence, your company will get noticed by more people which can be used to promote your business. The more followers you attract, the more readers you will generate for your news which enhances your relevance and target audience reach.
Improve Your SEO
Search engines formula is pretty straightforward; the more mentions, links and backlinks you have in the digital sphere, the higher you appear on search rankings. It is therefore important to back your content with relevant links and keywords. Equally, associating your web presence with high authority websites through backlinks will lead to better web ranking, and again scoring high in search rankings. To ensure you do well in search rankings, you need to make sure that your content is relevant, topical and offers value to the reader. Although not confirmed, but it is believed, that “likes” on Facebook and links on Twitter are recognized by search engines, another helping hand to improve your search rankings.
