Combining social media and digital public relations helps you leverage the strengths of both communication channels to create a memorable and distinctive brand.
Social and digital PR can help you amplify growth by targeting the right audience, telling compelling stories, and finding the right people to promote your brand.
Furthermore, as more people continue relying on social media to discover information, your brand needs to have a presence on these platforms.
Image via Pew Research Center
Additionally, you can leverage digital PR to build brand reputation, network, and grow audience trust.
And when you combine them?
You get a social and digital PR strategy that helps you improve awareness and grow your brand through natural, organic, and paid referrals.
But how can you integrate social media and digital PR? Leverage these tactics to increase the chances of a successful integration:
1. Start ambassador programs
Ambassadors are people your brand vets or trusts to promote your company in a positive light on social media. They include customers, employees, affiliates, etc.
But how do you successfully integrate ambassadors on social media into your digital PR strategy:
- Communicate expectations and provide clear guidelines.
- Keep ambassadors informed so that they always promote fresh content on social media.
- Make it easy for ambassadors to reach you and reply within reasonable time frames.
- Give them creative freedom.
- Track your program and use the insights to improve.
2. Work with influencers
Ever considered taking a course in influencer marketing? Well, you should.
With the skills gained, you can create an influencer strategy that supercharges your social and digital PR marketing. It also becomes easier to run programs that cut through the digital noise.
Take a look at some of the best practices when incorporating influencers in your social and digital PR strategy:
- Request them to share reviews of your products or services.
- Include them in your ambassadorship program.
- Collaborate with them on content creation.
- Work together to create a solution to a common problem affecting your audience.
3. Build robust partnerships with journalists and bloggers
Journalists receive voluminous pitches every day, but 61 percent say that only a quarter of the stories published come from these pitches.
Image via Muck Rack
The takeaway? Consider relevance when conducting a media outreach and ensure your pitch fits the journalist’s or blogger’s readership, mission, and writing model.
In fact, try and build relationships that increase the chances of your social and digital PR integration working.
But how?
- Scope social media for journalists, marketers and bloggers who post content around your niche and actively follow them.
- Become strategic about the where, when, and how often you can reach out to them.
- Consistently interact and share their content on social platforms.
- Use Help a Reporter Out (HARO) to respond to journalists’ requests.
- Contact bloggers for guest posting opportunities.
4. Leverage listening tools
Want to know what conversations people have around your brand and act upon this information in time? Include listening tools in your social and digital PR strategy.
These tools help you monitor the web and social media channels for mentions of your brand, product, campaigns, keywords, etc.
Best of all? They make it easy to integrate your social and digital PR strategy since you can use them to:
- Measure brand awareness: Find out how much people talk about your campaign, product, or brand online.
- Improve your hashtag strategy: Use the analytics to discover better ways to use hashtags on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Monitor reputation: Discover the tone and sentimentality surrounding conversations about your brand and solve issues before they escalate via social media.
- Gather competitor information: Get insights on keywords competitors use or a campaign they run.
- Find influencers: Discover people who can promote your brand.
- Audience analysis: Discover what kind of audience interacts with your products and content. Use it to discover new markets and audiences you can target.
5. Share news on social media
To boost your digital PR strategy, tap into the power of social media to reach more people on platforms they frequent.
However, remember that you need to summarize your points or provide a condensed version of your main story when creating social content. Alternatively, create an infographic or short video with highlights of the main story.
Then, share an external link that directs your audience to the whole story alongside the video, summary, or infographic.
Doing this enables you to leverage tactics that inform your audience, tap into their curiosity, and encourage them to check out the main story on your website.
6. Communicate with your audience
Successful audience communication relies on knowing the right questions to ask, targeting the right people, and understanding needs and requirements from analytics.
But you won’t achieve this without the right skills and expertise.
It’s why you need a communication management master’s degree or employees with management skills they can use to run both social and digital PR strategies.
It then becomes easy to leverage available tools, resources, and techniques to connect with audiences better.
But how can you leverage these communication management skills to integrate social media into digital PR?
- Leverage features such as groups, Stories, mentions, videos, live streams, inbox, etc., to engage and reach more people.
- Reply to comments, questions, mentions, and tags immediately to keep conversations going.
- Create hashtags that help you reach more audiences and build a community around your brand.
Reap more benefits with a social and digital PR integration
Growing your brand to higher heights becomes easier when you know how to integrate social media into your digital PR strategy.
From leveraging social influencers to simply rethinking how best to reach your audience—there are so many integration tactics you can use to increase your visibility and grow your brand.
Do you need further details on how to integrate social and digital PR strategies? Comment with your questions below, and we can make social and digital PR integration a reality for your brand.
