Some of the Top Social Media Avenues for PR Pros, Suggestions Welcome

by Jared Christensen

There are many social media sites that PR professionals can benefit from and utilize on a daily basis for their clients or organizations that they represent. While I don’t claim to be an expert on the topic, there are a few sites that I have utilized to assist in the growth of my clients.

Twitter If you’re reading this blog and you don’t know of Twitter, shame on you.  Twitter is designed around quick, short, catchy headlines that draw attention to specific topics using hashtags (ie #hastag), or providing links to other external things that could benefit your client.  Linking to your website always helps too; this helps with SEO (search engine optimization) for your website.  If you are able to, embed all your media (videos etc.) on your website and then most every link on Twitter should link over to page-specific article or embedded media source.  This generates traffic to your website and thus draws attention to your clients.  Twitter should be utilized and monitored frequently, perhaps several times a day, at all times of day.  You can quickly find out public opinion and halt disgruntled customers from causing a chain reaction of negativity toward your client or to thank customers for sharing their positive attitudes about your client.

YouTube YouTube has been considered the second most used search engine on the web, and it shouldn’t be taken lightly.  Some may not consider YouTube a social network, but there is plenty of interaction with other people, organizations, etc. on YouTube. Each of your clients should have various high-quality videos on their YouTube page (and embedded on your website).  As a PR pro, be sure that each video is actually quality and that it properly represents your client.  This can be tricky, but your client’s rely on you to know what’s good and what’s bad.  This should also correlate with your client’s website.   Having a nice looking YouTube channel with frequent monitoring and occasional video uploads have proven to be very beneficial for businesses.  PR is all about being seen and being transparent. There is no better way than to feature your client’s organization and even top management in your company in YouTube videos.

Facebook Facebook can provide your clients an opportunity to learn about their followers and active users or participants of their account.  It’s a great way to reach out and share stories from your website and be a bit more detailed than you can be on twitter.  Facebook should also be used and monitored frequently (like most social medias).  The benefits from using Facebook can be seen with the analytics feature, where you can learn specifics about your client’s audience.  This can be very specific information about things that they like, demographic information, most liked status updates, times of day that posts were like the most etc.  This can be useful in creating and sharing content targeted to specific users and specific attributes about your audience.

Hootsuite Hootsuite is a great tool that can be used to manage a wide variety of multiple social medias.  This can help you to optimize your posts and post it when more of your client’s followers are online, or when more people would see it.  Hootsuite is a social media manager and is of greater value to the PR pros that manage several accounts for several clients.  This way you can manage them all from a single dashboard.  Hootsuite also helps with analytics and you can even preschedule posts, just in case you know you want to say something but want to wait until it’s the optimal time (Hootsuite will post it for you when it’s optimal), or if you have an epiphany but you just posted, you can schedule it for a couple hours from now, and not lose your thought.  I love Hootsuite for managing all of my personal and business’ social medias. As I said earlier, I don’t know every social media site that could be of good use for PR professionals as I know there are many, so please comment on this article with suggestions of other articles that are beneficial.  Other great ones to be considered are LinkedIn, Google + and foursquare.