To effectively communicate with your target audience, maintain a good brand reputation, and improve awareness, you need to have ongoing relationships with traditional media outlets, journalists, and influencers as part of your media relations strategy.
However, social media has already transformed how we share and consume information. Today, social media users across different generations rely on social media platforms to search for products they want to buy, connect with friends, family, and colleagues, and stay up to date with the news. Take a look:
So, in addition to working with traditional media outlets, you need to integrate social media into your media relations strategy.
Think of it as having your cake and eating it, too. In this case, you start enjoying the benefits that both traditional media outlets and social media platforms offer.
On one hand, you maintain your relationships with journalists, influencers, and media outlets to continue getting coverage through traditional media channels. On the other hand, social media comes in to complement your efforts, by allowing you to expand your reach and engage directly with your audience.
In this post, we’ll look at the primary goals of your media relations strategy and share how you can boost your media relations strategy using social media.
Since media relations is a subset of public relations, one of the key goals of a media relations strategy is building relationships by engaging with journalists and influencers who help you shape the narrative around your brand.
These relationships help you get positive and balanced media coverage whenever you share narratives that influence the perception that your audience has about you and your brand.
For example, when you’re looking to establish your company as a thought leader, you’ll need to line up media interviews with internal subject matter experts to share their opinions on specific topics or trends affecting your industry.
Alternatively, if you have the content ready, you can share it with both journalists and influencers who then share it through relevant media channels.
Here’s what this looks like:
Cytiva, a biopharmaceutical company conducted a survey to assess the impact of government involvement in the biopharmaceutical industry during COVID-19.
It then partnered with The Financial Times to produce several digital assets including articles, videos, and podcasts sharing insights from their survey:
These insights provide the government and the biopharma industry with ways to further strengthen their relationship and safeguard public health in any future crisis and, in the process, establish Cytiva as a thought leader in the industry.
Whenever you’re dealing with a crisis or negative publicity, you can always fall back on your contacts to help you provide accurate information and manage communication effectively through media channels, and protect your reputation while mitigating potential damage.
How to boost your media relations strategy using social media
You can boost your media relations strategy using social media by working with influencers to amplify your messages, expanding your network of media contacts, monitoring relevant trends, and measuring your media relations efforts. Let’s look at each of these in-depth:
1. Collaborate with influencers to expand your reach
Since most media relations efforts rely on traditional media outlets, you can use social media to amplify your messages beyond these traditional outlets by sharing your content with your audience on relevant channels.
Besides, social media platforms also support different content formats, such as images, podcasts, videos, infographics, and live streaming, allowing you to engage your audience through visually compelling and interactive storytelling.
Using a multimedia approach makes your content more engaging, memorable, and shareable, enhancing the likelihood of media coverage and wider reach of your content.
If you don’t have a sizable audience on social media, you can reach out to journalists and influencers in your niche to help you increase brand awareness and reach your target audience.
Based on these types of influencers above, focus on working with professionals and micro-influencers to help you amplify your content.
Instead of manually looking for influencers and journalists to work with, make your work easier by using our media database to help you narrow down on the influencers and journalists you want to work with:
You get access to all the relevant information such as the types of subjects a journalist covers, their role, audience reach, and contact information.
2. Network and build relationships
Social media allows you to connect and interact with journalists and influencers. Once you start following and engaging with the content they share, you establish rapport, foster familiarity, and provide opportunities for meaningful interactions.
And if you’re wondering whether someone will notice your efforts to engage with them, here’s what Marc Randolph, the co-founder of Netflix, has to say about that:
For context, as a co-founder at Netflix, he has more than 86,000 followers on Twitter and more than 200,000 followers on LinkedIn as of this writing.
In turn, building these connections will get you more media coverage, opportunities to collaborate, and access to relevant media opportunities whenever you send your pitch to a journalist.
3. Monitor trends
Since social media platforms offer valuable insights into ongoing trends, conversations, and news in real time, you can monitor them to learn about emerging topics and respond promptly to media inquiries, as well as identify potential media opportunities or issues that require attention.
Do this by monitoring relevant hashtags and industry discussions to stay ahead of the curve. This empowers you to adapt to industry dynamics and position yourself as a thought leader.
In addition to monitoring trends to gain an edge, look out for content that is resonating with your audience. This allows you to adapt your media relations strategy to align with what your audience is looking for.
This will help you avoid going viral for the wrong reasons when pushing tone-deaf narratives that don’t consider sensitive social issues and current events.
4. Measure results
Social media platforms provide comprehensive analytics and metrics that allow you to measure the impact and effectiveness of your social media relations efforts.
You can measure metrics such as reach, level of engagement, clicks, and sentiment analysis to evaluate the success of an influencer marketing campaign, refine your strategies, and demonstrate the value of media relations activities to stakeholders.
Conclusion
We’ve covered different ways to boost your media relations strategy using social media, proving that social media comes in to complement your efforts.
When implementing your media relations strategy, use Agility PR to help you save time when looking for journalists to work with, social listening, and tracking your reach.
