How To Use Social Media For PR: A Step-By-Step Guide

Social media marketing is probably the most effective type of digital marketing. Consequently, many marketers are constantly looking for new ways to use social media platforms to promote brands and products. However, you must first understand the basics in order to get to more advanced techniques. Here’s how to use social media for PR.

Understand Your Audience

The first step to creating a comprehensive and effective social media campaign is to understand your audience. Do proper research and determine all the characteristics of your potential audience such as age, gender, occupation, location, needs, habits, interests, and preferences. You could also use some of your own criteria.

Having concrete buyer personas will allow you to determine the keywords that will work for you the best. Because you will be posting on social media, you will need to use hashtags instead of keywords, but the logic behind them is largely the same. Try to use different types of hashtags including:

• General: Everyone uses these as they do not correspond to a certain “field”. For example, #love or #quotes.
• Industry: These are the hashtags used by professionals from your industry. For instance, if you have a makeup brand, you would want to use #redlipstick or #pinkeyelashes.
• Branded: Such hashtags are specific to your business and can be either the name of your brand or your slogan. For example, #Nike or #JustDoIt.

Be Different & Unique

On social media, it is important to be different and unique in order not to get lost in the mass of other similar accounts. You need to stand out from the crowd in order to attract attention to your brand or business. Moreover, being authentic is essential for growing your follower base. By the way, this concerns both your image and your content.

You need to think about the kind of image of your business you want your social media profiles to project. What are the values your brand has? What is the message you want to be sending? Think through every detail before you start shaping this image with the help of your content (that might be even more important than you realize).

Create Original Content

Creating truly original content is difficult when there are so many other people just as talented as you. However, there is a way you can find something that will suit you best. You need to choose a topic you know and find an original approach to it. Spin the story in a way that nobody else has thought of.

It is very important that you create original content because this will determine the success or failure of your social media marketing campaign. Ideally, you would want to make use of all the types of content available to you starting with live streams and ending with image posts. Variety is always great.

You can also translate your content with the help of a translation service like The Word Point  if you want to reach wider, international audiences. This will allow you to reach more people and get more exposure. Besides, this is an amazing start if you want to go global with your brand eventually.

Start Conversations

Social media platforms are one of the best places to start conversations that are important for you and your community. If you want to establish yourself as an expert in your field, this is your chance to do so. You can be the one to talk about the newest achievements in your industry and create a buzz this way.

At the same time, you can start connecting with others by starting such conversations. Be active and don’t just think about yourself. It’s a good idea to leave comments under the posts you like and give your input on various matters. Don’t alienate yourself from other users on social media.

Build Your Community

Last but not least, you need to build your community. This is not an easy task, but you will get better at it as time passes. Essentially, this is very connected to the previous point and requires you to start conversations with others, both experts and potential customers. It’s a part of networking but online and with the help of social media.

Consider joining some groups or communities on such platforms as Facebook. You might be surprised by the kind of people you can meet there and the relationships you can start. Remember to pay attention to the people who follow you and reply to the comments they leave under your posts or the messages they send you with questions.

Final Thoughts

All in all, these tips will definitely help you better plan your social media marketing strategy to make your campaign more effective. Make sure that you understand each step before getting to the process itself.