Find out the many benefits of social media in PR and how it can boost your brand and company. Read more from the PR experts on the Playbook PR blog.
As part of a comprehensive, results-driven public relations strategy, social media is key to keeping your brand relevant and driving ROI. Whether you are in the startup phase, an established business, or want to reinvigorate your company, there are many benefits of social media PR. Let’s dive in and see which benefits you are already seeing, and which strategies an experienced PR and marketing firm can help you accomplish.
Increases Brand Reach
Social media PR is the modern equivalent of word-of-mouth marketing. As you post, share, and network on social media, your brand will connect directly to your target audiences through the strategic use of hashtags, sponsored posts, and more. With engaging, relevant content, your top audiences will share your posts to their networks and help to increase your brand’s reach and follower count incrementally. Making key announcements on social media (think awards, launches, and updates), sharing expertise, and even social media event posting strategies help your brand to show a diversity of content that engages viewers. This also assists in attracting the interest of journalists and the media to learn about your brand and cover it in their publications, multimedia, or TV segments. PR pros will assist you with social media strategies to interact with the media online and get them to present your story angles and interview you for more details.
Builds Trust
As your brand posts regular, useful content, your messages will get amplified and incrementally build trust. This helps to position your brand as an authority and keeps your messaging at the top of your target audiences’ minds. Beyond your loyal social media base, this facilitates attracting investors, business partners, and collaborators to grow your company. With guidance from a proven PR agency, your brand can work with influencers to exponentially grow your fan and customer base with their networks. Influencers with large digital followings can promote offerings, help your brand’s reputation, and skyrocket visibility for your key messaging.
Shows Human Side of Business
Since social media is more conversational, companies can show more of the behind-the-scenes about their brand and mission in a friendly tone. Instead of being so formal, social media allows for a more warm, approachable, and inviting communications strategy. The key is to keep consistent with this tone to keep your audiences’ trust. As social media is a two-way communication platform, this tone carries over to how your brand engages and interacts with the audience. A social media calendar, style guide, and regular posting strategy empower business owners and marketers to stay in the driver’s seat with their PR. Many companies also use social media to drive social impact. From corporate responsibility programs to charitable causes and beyond, social media assists in raising awareness about causes that matter to your brand and how your audiences can get involved. From hashtag campaigns to other interesting and impactful posts, social media can show the good you are doing in real-time.
Creates Measurable Results
With various social media platforms that your business can use, each has specific metrics that show you how posts, engagement, and more are doing. From these measurable results, you can refine which strategies are working best. PR agencies can help with social listening tools to further understand the social media landscape and how your social media strategies are working. Social media strategies can also be used to convert leads into customers, and your PR agency can help by testing which posts work best for sales, ROI, and other metrics that are important to your brand. From liking a post to commenting and sharing, every positive interaction gets the customer closer to a buying decision. Social media drives inbound traffic to your website and key links to help your buyer advance on the customer and user journey. Search engines also use a brand’s social media presence as a factor in search rankings. With a set of regularly used keywords and hashtags in social media, search engines will rank your brand higher than others who are not actively posting.
With your competitors most likely also being on social media, other benefits of social media PR include the transparency of what the competition is doing. From competitive research to an analysis of unique offerings and PR angles, brands benefit from seeing what the competition is doing. Likewise, you can see brands that you are inspired by to develop your business’ best practices and potential partnerships that can give your brand a boost.
Manages Relationships and Threats
In our increasingly connected and vocal world, social media is one of the first lines of defense when public commentary and threats emerge on a brand’s social media channels. From regular monitoring to ensure relationships are being upheld to reacting to threats swiftly, a social media crisis plan is important to have in advance. With the viral nature of social media posts, it’s key to be proactive about brand reputation crises and have spokespeople ready and trained in talking to the media with a PR agency’s guidance. By working with journalists and the media in advance of any crisis, your brand helps set the stage for when an issue does occur so the media shows a more balanced version of what happened.
Increases Affordability of Marketing
Versus ad campaigns in traditional media and billboards, social media PR is an affordable investment of your company’s time and money. With a trusted PR agency to carry out all the fine details on a daily and weekly basis, you can take a lot of the guesswork out of social media PR and marketing. Paid advertising on social media channels is also reasonable and a good way to focus on how you want the social media PR to convert into an ROI.
Takeaway
A solid social media PR strategy and regular touchpoints can be a gamechanger for your brand, amplifying your message and allowing your brand to speak from a position of strength. Contact Playbook PR at (813) 789-7122 or online to determine the mix of traditional and social media that will work best for your business’ short and long-term goals.
