How to Leverage Social Media for your PR strategy?

Social media and PR Strategy

Leveraging social media for your PR strategy is vital today in the world of media relations, and is essential to any business that wants to foster serious growth. Here are five ways associated with utilizing social media in your PR efforts:

Five ways you can leverage social media for your PR strategy:

Identify your audience and develop a unique brand voice

Knowing your marketing audience plays a major role in determining the success of your efforts. It would be futile to create content and promote it to an audience that does not resonate with your brand. Therefore, market research is mandatory.

Research your target demographics. Learn more about the topics that your target audience would be interested in. Understand their likes and dislikes to generate content that would be useful to them.

Focus on creating an emotional connection with the audience. According to research at Fractl, strong emotional hooks played a definitive role in their content marketing campaigns.

Always remember the right content acts as a catalyst to brand success. It helps establish a unique brand voice.

Have your leaders publish content on LinkedIn and Twitter

LinkedIn is one of the best professional networks with a user base of about 810M members globally. Due to its reputation as a business-focused platform, most PR teams do not prioritize leveraging LinkedIn for PR. They fail to understand the potential of LinkedIn for branding and PR.

To succeed at using LinkedIn for PR, make sure you are active on LinkedIn and share content to engage your audience. A consistent online presence on this channel is key. Secondly, connect with industry leaders and influencers and strike up meaningful conversations with them.

Similarly, Twitter is also another platform that can be leveraged for PR.

Partner with relevant influencers

Recommendations are one of the best word-of-mouth strategies you can follow to build your digital brand. It is an effective method of promoting your products and marketing services.

Here are the advantages of pairing with influencers.

• Increases awareness about your brand and helps you reach out to a larger audience
• Helps you build credibility and trust
• Provides your audience with valuable content
• Drives sales and helps your buyers make thoughtful decisions
• Opens you up to a wider market and supports effective lead generation

Engage with journalists and other media professionals

Journalists have the knack for identifying real news amidst a sea of digital articles. Their drive to explore can help you spread a word about your products and services to a large audience. They know exactly what it takes to make a certain piece of content shine and garner all the attention.

• Research about the journalists and check if they cover stories like yours
• Keep your pitch concise.
• Attach your research, data insights, press kits, image assets, and other supporting materials to your email.
• Follow up with them at regular intervals

Create a crisis management plan

A crisis can happen at any time. If you are not prepared to handle a crisis, a lot of bad things could happen. Your digital brand image can suffer. You could lose customers and your sales could go down. It is always a good idea to keep a crisis management plan ready.

• Create a crisis management checklist for the team. Ensure all the documentation, contact details, etc. made available to the team to respond to a crisis
• Monitor and assess the impact of the crisis and communicate the same to all stakeholders
• Plan and arrange medical, financial as well as emotional support services
• Review and revise your crisis management plan according to your learnings and update the team about the same.