Online PR and Social Media
When you decided to invest time and money into Social Media Marketing for your business, you probably had a few goals in mind, right? Garnering attention for your website, building awareness for your brand, maybe increasing sales? Chances are, you’ve tried other media sources to obtain these results, but have seen lukewarm results. The key to a successful online marketing campaign is in using your Social Media Marketing in tangent with other, more traditional marketing tools, like PR.
PR is often forgotten as a marketing tool. However, a press release can be used to share a large range of information about an organization, from new employee hires, new product introductions, expansions or moving of offices, the addition of a new marketing direction (like when you build a Facebook FAN Page for your company). As long as the content you’re sharing is timely, directly related to your company, and of potential interest to your clients or target market, you can work up a PR for it.
Once you decide what news you want to share, you have both the traditional print PR options, as well as the online PR sites to use to share out your content, based on geographic area and industry. Online PR’s can be picked up by the major search engines as well as news sites that focus on your industry.
Factor in a Social Media Marketing plan, and you now have the ability to drive the PR content you have sent out to the masses via PR sites like PR.com, PRWeb.com, or 24-7-press-release.com and share them with your Facebook fans, Twitter, followers, LinkedIn groups, etc.
What punch can this add to your PR response? Your social media contacts, whom you have targeted based on your own criteria, are accustomed to hearing from you when you post when you tweet, and share blogs or articles to your groups. You can use that familiarity to drive your news to a target audience that automatically offers a higher response rate than any “spray and pray” PR will return.
So, work on your next PR. Running a promotion? Write a PR. Adding a new staff member? Write a PR. Adding a service for your clients, write a PR. Then push that content out through all your Social Media sites, profiles, and groups to keep your contacts in the know and increase your bottom line results.