How a Public Relations Firm Helps You Navigate the Best and Worst of Social Media

More and more, PR firms are handling social media engagement and content marketing for their clients. This is a good thing, because the social media ecosystem is a vast and complicated landscape that can be difficult at best to navigate effectively. Whenever possible, we recommend leaving the management of your valuable brand to experts who have years of experience with each of the major networks.Still, some clients decide to forge ahead on their own. For those brave souls, we offer some pointers from our years in the trenches. Let’s get started with social media 101.



Facebook

One of the biggest lessons you’ll learn is that organic reach in Facebook is miniscule. If you’re lucky, only a single digit percentage of your audience will ever see your posts, no matter how clever they might be. Instead, we recommend jumping into paid offerings immediately via promoted posts and ad campaigns. For as little as $10 per post, you can vastly expand the reach of your individual posts. If you have a genuine budget to allocate, go with campaign ads that continually run in your targeteduser’s news feed (or right hand ad column).

Twitter

Connecting with your brand’s audience 140 characters at a time can seem daunting, and indeed it is. But once you realize how much time you’ll need to put in to foster communication, you’ll start to wonder if it’s all worth it. Instead, take a shortcut and much like our advice for Facebook, move to  promoted tweets, Twitter’s paid advertising platform. You can target Twitter users by keywords, interest, geography and even the device they use.

Instagram

Facebook acquired this photo-based social network a few years ago and the app has seen extraordinary growth since then. With over 150 million active instagrammers out there, it can seem like the place to be for some companies. One short cut to developing an audience on Instagram, is to leverage hashtags. By adding appropriate hashtags to your photo posts, you can make your photos much more searchable to other users, who will then be more likely to follow you. A word to the wise, however: keep your hashtags relevant. Irrelevant hashtags are the Instagram equivalent of spam. A big no-no.

Pinterest

Pinterest is one of the fastest-growing social networks ever launched and it’s still running strong today. Not only does the service offer a large user base to market to, it continually launches business-friendly tools and services to keep marketers and advertisers interested. One of the first things to learn about Pinterest, is how to pin content so that it links through to your website. Don’t settle for repining other user’s content, get in there and share some of your own. And where that content links back to your website? Make sure to have compelling calls-to-action as to what the visitor can do next. Make the next steps, whether it’s to purchase something, or to sign-up for something, very obvious.

For more social media tips and tricks, visit our PR firm and continue reading.