subject: Using Social Media To Support Public Relations Activity [print this page] Like it or not, using social media is now something that's become part of many people's every day lives.
If social media is not a platform where a company is already engaged, it's easy to dismiss it as a place where people simply tell each other about what they had for lunch or share photos of their latest night out. But the fact is that platforms such as twitter, Facebook, Posterous, Tumblr and social news sharing sites such as Digg and Reddit can simultaneously benefit and harm your business. As such, it's an arena that all savvy businesses need to be exploring to some extent.
Below, you'll find a brief outline of how social media can be used to support your other PR activity.
Speaking to your audience
By creating a twitter or Facebook account, you can reach your audience instantly any news or interesting developments can be tweeted' immediately, allowing you to speak directly to your customers and business associates.
Creating Facebook groups or similar is also a good idea to create a buzz around your business. Remember that interactive tweets' and comments where you ask your customers to respond to a question of query will promote discussion and can increase your internet presence considerably.
Monitoring responses
Social media allows you to keep track on any positive feedback you're getting. In this instant gratification age, people are now much more likely to air their grievance on twitter than sit down and write a complaint email to the company concerned. Similarly, should your company experience any crisis or find itself the subject of a negative news story, you can use twitter to monitor what people are saying.
It's easy to set up searches for your brand or company name on tools like TweetDeck in order to be able to see what people are saying about your company. It also gives you a forum to quickly respond to any comments should you wish to.
Links
Don't forget you can create traffic back to your website by linking your tweets' back there. Also, be sure to place links to your accounts on your website so that people know where to find you.
The most important thing to remember is: make sure your social media platforms are regularly updated and as interactive as possible - an unattended Twitter account could cause your reputation more harm than good.
Using Social Media To Support Public Relations Activity
