New Trend: Social Media PR Campaigns

Public Relations have been placed at the forefront of marketing and communication strategies to build awareness of your business to existing and potential customers. The new trend in Consumer Public Relations is social media PR campaigns.

PR practitioners, when carrying out a PR campaign, use several communication channels to deliver the company’s messages. During the last years, there has been a wide use of social media. Globalisation has changed the ways of communication and people do not want to be passive receivers of messages anymore. They want to be part of the plot. ‘Word of mouth’ publicity seems to be very influential nowadays and social media platforms offer the opportunity for that to happen massively.
To achieve a greater impact, it is necessary to follow the new tendencies in audience’s communication habits and adjust as soon as possible.

A social media PR campaign is the key to achieve brand loyalty. You interact and build personal relationships with existing or potential customers because the brand immediately acquires a human substance behind the computer screen. Direct connection with your target audience results to improve awareness over the brand and its products or services. Subsequently this leads to an attitude and behaviour change, which facilitates the path to purchase.

Using social media to deliver a PR campaign helps maintain control of what is published about your company, by taking out the middlemen like journalists, that inevitably exist when delivering a PR campaign through traditional media. Social networks allows you to be your own media, publish your own content and communicate directly with your customers.

The interaction with the public by using social media platforms is a two-way communication between a brand and its consumers. It offers the opportunity of getting feedback on your targeted consumer. By identifying what they need, want or don’t want, it can save you loads of money, time and effort. You are going to know exactly what the public is looking for and you will be there to provide it to them.

When you open an online conversation with everyone, while delivering a PR campaign, it is possible to receive negative criticism. Be prepared to deal with it by attending the communication channels on a daily basis. Remove any trolling or spam feedback and respond to negative comments in a coordination with the company. Showing that customers are first priority, a potential issue can turn into an opportunity for the brand.

Take advantage of this new trend in the industry to make your brand stand out in the market. Let it be that the others follow you and not the other way around.

This video was produced for the purposes of an assignment for the course MA Public Relations in University of Westminster, London, UK.

Source of all images used in this video is Google.