How to Use Social Media to Amplify Your Digital PR Strategy
Public relations has always been considered a social medium. The central goal of every digital PR strategy is to initiate and retain valued conversations and relationships with your public. Social channels boost promotional campaigns by amplifying PR messages.
Public relations agencies and brands do not have to be solely reliant on third-party coverage; they can create campaigns or amplify existing ones with the power of social media marketing.
In an interrelated communications ecosystem, both the business client and PR agency can capitalize on the power of social media to amplify a campaign.
Social Networking in the PR Landscape
Social amplification is the idea of taking a favorable action, like a company achievement or piece of high-profile media coverage and sharing it across social media networks. It is essentially widening one’s reach through social media marketing.
As an agency that offers social media management and amplification through paid and organic, the M studio team has listed four of the top social platforms that have changed PR in a positive way. In fact, these platform's roles and impacts have propelled the PR industry into the modern world.
This is the ever-present channel when it comes to social media marketing. Why do PR professionals and digital marketers love Facebook? End users can share high-quality content in the form of an image, infographic, post, link, or video.
To successfully promote a business on Facebook, a company must transform into a conversational brand. In addition, PR experts can explore other useful facets of the platform, including shop features, creators studio, and Facebook Business Manager. Good for organic and excellent for paid, the platform can be advantageous to PR practitioners - with a little hard work and networking.
Since each post is just limited to 280 characters, messaging should be short and to the point. Companies use Twitter specifically to make a public announcement about their business like a product launch, a recently won award, a new label in the market, an upcoming event, or an update on an emergency or crisis.
Twitter also enables brands to emulate live news coverage by publishing updates throughout the event, known as “live-tweeting.” There is also the ever-effective Twitter thread. This technique allows you to post longer pieces of content. You can tag partners, media pick-ups, and more via a longer, expanded thread.
Everyone wants to be Insta famous, right? The app is often the top priority of many of our agency's social media marketing clients. It is constantly evolving its features which is fun, but also tedious. New additions to stories roll out over time. And the Reels function has added a whole new layer to video on the platform.
Additionally, the functions Search and Explore have turned Instagram into an easily navigable source.
More so, to exhibit the credentials and offerings of their clients on Instagram, PR firms use images to increase awareness of issues and their causes. They take followers behind the scenes to create a more personal connection, engaging them before, during, and after the event.
Brands also capitalize on Instagram by working with influencers whose followers are greater in number. Instagram’s branded content features and whitelisting capabilities are another reason why it is a great platform for influencer marketing.
Through this platform, an agency can curate content instead of creating it. All one needs to do is “pin” the images in their virtual boards. These images can then be used to attract and drive visitors to relevant owned media web pages or current social media campaigns.
Pinterest is a great source of social amplification for brands and PR agencies that are trying to pique customers’ “interest” in a particular topic, and then easing them into the brand’s PR or marketing funnel. We also find its an excellent external referrer of website traffic. Oftentimes, it beats out Instagram and Facebook in its ability to organically drive qualified traffic to the websites our agency manages.
TikTok
Once a sleeper social media platform, TikTok officially has more than 1 billion monthly active users a month. People love it and its prominence is increasing. Have you noticed people sharing their TikTok content on Instagram? Yeah, it’s a thing.
Now, when it comes to messaging and demographics, TikTok is important if you are trying to reach young consumers. We’re talking the tail of Gen Y and Gen Z - or 30 and younger. In fact, 48% of TikTok users in the US are between 18 and 29 years old according to HootSuite.
As you may already know, a lot of the content on TikTok is funny and engaging. The editing features, music, and voiceover capabilities allow end-users and brands to really stretch their creativity. Stories and Reels on Instagram echo these capabilities.
Hashtags as Collective Social Amplifier
Originally, it was Twitter users who started including the #symbol as a prefix to relevant keywords. It was meant to help organize tweets so that people interested in that keyword can join groups who use the same hashtags. That was more than a decade ago.
Today, all major social media networks use them.
When clicked once on any platform, the end-user is automatically shown all the other posts containing the same or a similar hashtag. This can be remarkably valuable for publicists and marketers. You can control your content beyond your own followers and to a more targeted customer base.
Hashtags help companies get discovered. You can also use them to “own” your social media presence by creating branded hashtags that align with your marketing campaign. Hashtags also are a great way to tie together a multi-platform social media campaign.
Social Amplification with PR Integration
Social media can be a challenging tool for amplification, but hopefully the concepts above help you better navigate it all. The most important idea to understand is that you should integrate social media in your PR initiatives. A well-balanced campaign that includes paid, owned, and earned media amplified by social media is a good road map for success.
As a New Jersey-based branding and public relations agency, M Studio always recommends clients use social media for PR amplification.
For years, we have campaigned for our B2B and B2C clients through Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, among others.
Have a question about your social media marketing strategy? Drop us a line!