Social media
Social media presents a multitude of opportunities to increase your exposure online and interact with people you want to influence. This fast moving environment also needs to be managed carefully so as to protect your reputation and minimise negative commentary when things go wrong.
Social media strategy works best as part of your overall PR campaign. It’s also an excellent way to generate links to your website and other online content and to boost your Search Engine Optimisation.
Social media can work on different levels, from helping disseminate news to really engaging with people you want to build relationships with. It isn’t complicated to set up or expensive to manage. The secret is in choosing the right social media platforms and then creating and managing the content.
The all important content can be created by you, or your PR agency, or both working together. Social media strategy can integrate with marketing and human resources as well as PR.
Five top tips
• Content is ‘King’ in social media (which is why PR should lead on it) – it shows who you are and gets across your brand personality through content which is friendly, engaging and relevant.
• Create a Twitter site and use it to build high numbers of ‘followers’ who’ll be interested in your ‘tweets’ - short 140 character messages about what you are doing! Follow people you’re interested in with the aim of getting them to follow you! Use engaging content - be lively, different, timely, topical.
• Journalists pick up on news through Twitter and send direct messages when they’re interested. Many of the people you’re interested in building relationships with (e.g. MPs) will be avid tweeters too.
• Other ways to use Twitter include: promoting new video content (and links with your branded YouTube); re-tweeting news and information from others to create virals; using Twitpic to upload photos and images etc. Try incentives to encourage new followers!
• Create branded Facebook and YouTube pages and use these to educate and engage your audience. Facebook is the most popular social networking site in the World with over 600 million members and YouTube is the second most used search engine after Google.
For further advice, please feel free to call us on 01473 326400 or just drop us a line at hello@genesispr.co.uk.
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