Social media and PR should go arm-in-arm to build your brand and grow your business. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses still maintain a distance between PR teams and social media teams.
While social media and PR are slightly different (PR is all about building and maintaining relationships, while social media is more about getting your brand’s message out into the world), the two complement one another brilliantly.
Social media can be a powerful tool in the hands of the right PR team. It enables and empowers PR professionals, helping them spread good PR far and wide. But, in order to achieve this and grow your business as a result, you need to consciously integrate your PR and social media strategies.
How? Let’s take a look.
Why should you integrate social media and PR?
PR – Public Relations – is all about building your reputation and strengthening relationships with your audiences. Social media, on the other hand, is all about creating content and distributing it as far as possible. Both are very useful in their own ways. But why do you need to combine the two?
For a start, in this day and age, it's impossible for PR to exist independently of social media, so you may as well integrate them properly. But even without that factor, there are plenty of good reasons to integrate social media and PR. Here are just a few.
It helps you to reach new audiences
Social media is unparalleled when it comes to reaching new audiences. So much so that bringing in a bigger social media following is a big preoccupation for many up-and-coming businesses.
Sure, you could buy B2B leads and rely on them to spread your messaging. That's often a decent strategy for short-term growth and can help you get your social media strategy off the ground. But in the longer term, you need to be expanding your reach organically and consistently.
This is where PR and social media integration comes in. Public Relations professionals have the expertise that will help you get attention and build a positive reputation, and social media provides the perfect platform to get that messaging out to large organic audiences.
By combining and integrating PR and social media, something like a product launch will reach far further than it would have done with either PR or social media alone.
It's vital for effective digital transformation
If you want to fully realize the potential of digital technologies for your business, you need to commit to digital transformation. Integrating social media with your overall PR strategy is a big part of any effective digital transformation.
What is digital transformation,, though? It's commonly thought to be the process of 'putting your business online'. This includes things like building an ecommerce website, developing a social media presence, and automating certain core processes. But there's more to it than that.
True digital transformation is as much about your growth strategy as it is about the software and platforms you use. This is why a fully integrated social media/PR strategy is so important for digital transformation.
It effectively weaves together the online and offline elements of your marketing, PR, messaging, and general outreach in ways that will help you grow your digital reputation and your 'real-world' business relationships.
It brings you closer to the P of PR
Ultimately, PR is about building your reputation with the public. That's the P of PR. And the modern public hangs out on social media.
So, any decent public relations strategy will understand the importance of social media in reaching modern target audiences.
By integrating social media and PR, you give yourself the best possible chance of getting your message to the right people, in the right way.
So, combining PR and social media brings you a lot closer to the P of PR while simultaneously enhancing the power and impact of your messaging.
7 ways to integrate social media and PR for business growth
So, now you know why it's a good idea to integrate social media with your PR strategy. But how can you do this successfully?
Here are seven tips to help you out
1. Take social media seriously
In order to get the best PR from your social media, you need to remake your growth mindset with social media front and center.
What does this look like in practice? Here are some tips:
- Be consistent with posting. Don't just hop onto your social media platforms when you've got a conveniently shareable photo. Create social media posts and release them on a regular and consistent basis.
- Engage. Keep eyes and ears on your social media posts, and actively engage with things like comments, shares, and so on. Listen to what people are saying about your posts, draw lessons from what you hear, and engage positively with your audience where appropriate.
- Build a solid social media strategy. Give your social media marketing the same strategic status as you would televised campaigns. A good social media strategy will help you to understand the importance of social media in your overall PR landscape, and enable you to maximize the impact of your social media activity.
- Consider how everything will look on social media. When designing anything for traditional media outlets, consider how it will look on social media. Even if you don't add social sharing buttons to your press releases etc (more on that in a moment), it's likely that any piece of content or PR you put out there will end up on social media in one form or another. So, think about how it will look and play out on social media whenever you're designing any form of content, appearance, interview etc.
- Integrate marketing campaigns strategically. Extend this strategic approach to encompass your broader marketing initiatives, ensuring they are crafted to blend seamlessly with your social media and PR efforts. This integration is key to maximizing reach and impact, fostering a cohesive presence across all platforms. You can use an AI image description generator to easily convert PR features into social media posts.
By taking social media seriously and increasing its strategic importance to your business, you will make it a lot easier to integrate your social media presence with your PR in meaningful, impactful ways.
2. Add social sharing buttons to press and media pieces
This one is relatively simple to do, but can have an impressively wide-ranging impact. Embed social media options into PR pieces for traditional channels. Press releases are the obvious one here, but this also goes for things like interviews, event announcements, and more.
Why should you do this? Well, as we mentioned above, it's highly likely that anything you put out into the world will end up on social media one way or another. Whether it's people posting photos and videos of your events or sharing press about you, it's impossible to avoid getting on social media if you do something even slightly noteworthy.
So, don’t try to avoid it. Instead, you should take control of it. Accept that social media is always going to be a factor in your PR, and lean into it.
By adding social sharing buttons to your PR materials, you make it a lot easier for people to share your stuff in ways that work well for you. Rather than screenshots of interviews taken out of context or blurry videos of your team members speaking at events, curate your own press releases and videos and make it easy for people to share them.
This kind of integrated business planning gives you a much greater element of control over what gets shared, and spreads that positive PR over a wider social audience with ease.
Here, for example, is a press release from Nike. The 'Share' button is prominently displayed right at the top of the page:
3. Build your business network through social media
Any PR pro will tell you that "It's not what you know, it's who you know". So, one of the best ways to bring PR and social media together is to get to know people through social platforms. Use social media to gather a network of useful professional contacts around your brand.
Building a business network through social media is a big topic in and of itself. If you're not sure where to start, try these ideas:
- Join relevant industry groups on platforms like LinkedIn, and contribute to discussions.
- Write guest posts for other brands. Blogs, reviews, interviews, and so on are all great content that other brands can use with the added bonus for you that you make a new contact and get your name out there.
- Use business lead generation companies. Whether you work B2B or B2C, lead generation and networking require many of the same skills and tactics, so it's as easy for specialist lead generation companies to pull in business contacts as it is for them to pull in business clients.
- Keep up to date with relevant industry news, topics, and so on. This will tell you which trends and hashtags to follow and help you to contribute to online industry discussions in meaningful ways which will build your reputation (and your network with it!)
- Hop onto hashtags wherever you can, and contribute to them where relevant. For example, if you are a hair salon brand and a starlet's new style has gained a trending hashtag, maybe post your own take on that style with that hashtag. This will gain you attention and followers within your community, as well as showcase your abilities.
4. Use social media channels to build community
As well as building your network, use social media to engage with your target audience in ways that go beyond simply posting marketing. Go into social media with a PR mindset as well as a social marketing mindset, and engage with your public through social channels. Don’t limit yourself to simply posting content and engaging with the odd commenter. Instead, try to build community through social media.
How can you do this? Here are some ideas:Leverage user-generated content. Public relations teams love UGC. User-generated content asks your target audience to get involved with content creation through things like hashtags, games, reviews, and so on. This makes your users feel more involved with your brand, while also showing the wider world exactly why people love you.
Here is an example from Apple, which asks users to show off the capabilities with the iPhone by sending in iPhone shots with the hashtag #ShotOniPhone:
- Engage with your audience. Respond to comments, ask questions, and generally make your brand/follower relationship a two-way street.
- Reward your audience for following you with things like competitions and giveaways.
5. Leverage good PR on social media through cross-posting and hashtags
This may sound obvious, but one of the biggest advantages of social media for PR is that it gets your good PR out to a wide audience. So, make sure it's doing that job properly by putting all good PR on social media.
Ideally, you should do this as part of a coherent PR/social media strategy consisting of carefully curated PR opportunities combined with social media posts, content marketing, catchy hashtags, and plenty of follow-up engagement from both your social media teams and your PR teams.
But if you don't have the time or resources to roll out a full PR/social media campaign, simply posting your good PR on your social media and loading it up with relevant hashtags will work wonders. Here's an example of cross-posting good PR from a Michigan engineering firm:
6. Build social media into your crisis management plans
Crisis management is part of what a good PR team does, and it's really important that this aspect of their work incorporates social media in a big way.
Integrating social media and crisis management involves things like:
- Working out PR protocols for social media disasters (for example, getting review-bombed or going viral for something bad).
- Working out a social media plan for PR disasters (for example, figuring out how and when to address bad PR with social media posts).
- Appointing social media crisis management officers, who will have both the PR and social media skills needed to step in and fight fires when needed.
- Investing in social media analytics tools that will alert you quickly if you start trending for the wrong reasons on social platforms.
7. Use the right tools and techniques
There are a wealth of tools and platforms out there which can boost both your PR and your social media, and combine them for maximum business growth.
For example, social media aggregator tools let you embed social feeds wherever you need them, which is great for keeping people informed, building your social audiences, and quickly getting good PR out there.
Similarly, good analytics tools will tell you how your posts and campaigns are doing across your social networks, and let your PR team know if anything's trending. This enables your PR gurus to capitalize on good social trends and work quickly to put out social media fires.
There's an astonishing amount of martech, social media tools, and PR platforms available, and most of them will help you integrate your PR and social media in innovative and useful ways. So, shop around and build a tech stack that works for you.
Integrate social media and PR for great business outcomes
Social media is great for amplifying the messages that your PR teams curate. By integrating social media with PR, you can reach new audiences, deepen your brand/customer relationships, be responsive and proactive with both positive and negative PR, and generally build both your brand and business faster.
The right tools can make it easy to integrate social media and PR, so make sure that you have the very best in your tech stack. Check out Curator’s social media aggregator if you’re interested in seeing how great tech can transform your PR.