Social Media as a Public Relations Strategy Notes
Social Media as a Public Relations Strategy
If you work in public relations, you may manage social media for your organization or clients.
Planning considerations:
Content: What to say.
Frequency: How often to post.
Tone: How to say it.
Approval: Set up approval processes.
Monitoring: Monitor presence and respond to user activity.
Social Media Impact and User Motivation
Aim: connect and influence target publics through social media efforts.
Need to understand how people use social media and their motivations.
Non-users:
Black: concerned about safety, technically inexperienced, or "intellectual rejecters" who see social media as a waste of time.
Yellow report: % are not interested or don't see it as useful; only % attribute this to security concerns.
User categories: alpha socializers, attention seekers, followers, faithfuls, or functionals.
Understanding these helps develop content that appeals to different audience groups.
Developing a Social Media Strategy
Understand how the target audience uses social media and why.
Meltwater and We Are Social's Digital Australia report (2023):
Useful information on social media usage by demographics.
Motivations for using social media.
How businesses can best use social media.
Main reasons for using social media:
Keeping in touch with friends and family.
Filling spare time.
Accessing news.
Finding video content.
Seeing content from brands and finding products to purchase are also important.
Yellow report:
Users are more likely to trust brands with many followers.
Brands that interact positively with customers.
Brands that have engaging, relevant, and regularly updated content.
Organizations need a professional social media presence as influences reputation.
Small to medium-sized businesses use social media to promote themselves, create awareness, interact with publics, and generate new business.
Most frustrating thing is dealing with negative comments and reviews.
Business aims should align with user expectations in terms of posted content.
% of small to medium-sized businesses use Facebook.
use LinkedIn or Instagram.
paid to advertise on social media.
Over % didn't have a strategy to drive traffic to their social media.
Average social media spend was around .
Managed social media internally.
Effectiveness measured by response to posts and asking new customers how they found the organization.
Social Media as Two-Way Communication
Social media as a PR strategy should be two-way communication.
Reflects Grunig's two-way symmetric model of public relations.
Both the organization and the audience have a mutually beneficial relationship.
Audience has increased power: organizations can source immediate feedback and engage directly with their publics.
Effective way for organizations to build a genuine connection with their publics.
Social media fueled PR's move toward content creation and owned media.
Content can be shared directly with target publics and stakeholders.
Social media relies on user-generated content.
Increased power of the audience encouraged organizations to be more transparent.
Downfalls of Social Media as PR Strategy
Algorithms can make it difficult to achieve cut through with organic content.
Time-consuming to come up with different content for different platforms and manage responses.
One negative comment can change the direction of the conversation about the brand.
Keeping up with the many different platforms that are constantly emerging and changing can be time-consuming.
Having the ability to connect with your audience and to create content for your organization and to directly disseminate that to publics can be challenging in terms of keeping up to date with changes in the industry, managing it from a time perspective, and also the fact that users do have instant access and can publish content about your organization very widely.
Developing a Social Media Strategy: Formative Research
First step: formative research or social listening.
Examine what's being said on social media about the organization or industry.
Consider:
Target publics and how they use social media.
Objective of the campaign.
Which social platforms will be best used to achieve those objectives.
Johnston describes this first stage as the lurk stage.
Checking out what others are doing, what can you learn from them, benchmarking performance, and analyzing the performance of competitors on social media.
Dialogue audit (Kim):
Analyzes the organization's online presence, looks at conversations within the brand's social media platforms.
Examines response rate to community posts, whether questions and comments are answered, whether influencers are responded to, and whether complaints are addressed.
Analyzes the community's participation in the dialogue.
Conversation rate: the rate at which conversation happens within the social platform (comments, replies, etcetera).
Amplification rate: was that post shared or retweeted? Was it amplified to a wider audience?
Applause rate: measures the affinity of the community with the post (likes, favorites, or other affirmation-based actions).
Economic value/return on investment: can be difficult to measure as social media is heavily focused on relationship building.
Consider conversations outside of your brand's social media platform.
What are competitors doing in the space?
What's the share of voice that competitors have?
Do they dominate the conversation on certain issues that are relevant to your organization?
Analyze the type of content they post and whether this reflects the organization, its publics and stakeholders, and also the voice and tone of the organization, its brand identity.
Tools: Google, Facebook Analytics, and Hootsuite.
Public Relations Institute of Australia (PRIA) guidelines for analyzing social media coverage.
Includes a template on the course site.
Methods of measurement:
Sentiment of community interaction.
Conversation resonance of key messages.
Strength and consistency of communication throughout a campaign.
Each criteria has a score of zero to two.
Tone: negative = 0, neutral = 1, positive = 2.
Engagement rate might include time spent, number, and/or length of comments, small posts, and unique commentators.
Amplification rate: the number of times content created is amplified by people sharing it with their own followers.
Other three criteria could relate specifically to campaign objectives.
Social media should be part of an integrated communication approach and address organizational goals and objectives.
Shouldn't operate in isolation to traditional PR and marketing activity.
Should be coordinated and consistent and reflect the organization's identity and brand.
Not necessarily the answer to every communication challenge.
Ascertain whether it's the right fit for your communication objectives, for your budget, and for your target publics and stakeholders.
Step one: listening stage.
Step two: strategy design.
Apply the data and learning from stage one to creating the campaign and the tactical components.
Development of key messages and creative aspects.
Choose the right platforms and the right messaging.
Consider the brand, the tone of the campaign, and specifically of the posts.
Consider the budget: organic content or paid content; can use social media influencers.
Another approach to developing a social strategy from Sprout Social.
Identifying and setting the goals, researching the audience, analyzing competitors first, and then doing that audit of the current social content.
Platform Options
Facebook: most widely used platform in Australia and internationally.
Consider what Facebook is good for and what users will respond to.
Tends to be an older audience (30-45 age group).
Good for boosting general brand awareness and creating conversation.
Good paid advertising opportunities.
Complicated and ever-changing algorithm.
Use your Facebook page to draw attention, to stimulate desire and spark action, and to use videos as much as possible.
Instagram: owned by Meta; all about visuals.
High-quality, attractive images.
Short video in the form of Reels.
Less text than on Facebook.
Younger audience, particularly female.
Content that tells the story of the brand, that encourages engagement, that has that narrative editorial flare.
Growth of e-commerce options has seen much more of a direct sales focus.
TikTok: gained popularity during the pandemic.
Huge amount of users worldwide.
Brands achieve new audiences.
Very good for capturing events and live content, behind-the-scenes tutorials.
Platforms are continually emerging, evolving, and changing.
WeChat: specifically for the Chinese-speaking market, including users in Australia.
Australian users.
In China, the more other mainstream platforms that we know, Facebook, Instagram, etcetera, are blocked.
Twitter: decreased in popularity in recent years, though still popular amongst the media and politicians and decision makers.
Good way of raising awareness of your organization, of creating conversation on timely issues that might affect your organization, and also gaining attention from those media outlets and politicians who you might be looking to for support.
Kim's Strategy
Strategy:
Formative research listening stage.
Strategy development stage: work out messaging, platforms.
Implementation and monitoring stage.
Plan the activity, develop the content and schedules, put in place processes for monitoring social media activity and sentiment during the campaign, and ensuring strategies are in place to adapt the campaign if required.
Need to be able to change tact and be very flexible in terms of changing our content in response to outside factors or things that might be happening in the wider environment.
Social media strategy needs to be very agile.
Evaluation: assess the outcomes of the campaign, the return on investment, whether communication objectives were achieved, and what improvements could be made.
Social Media Campaign Case Study
Destination New South Wales (tourism body for promoting New South Wales within Australia).
Campaign was developed in response to the pandemic when we couldn't travel internationally, and there were no, obviously, international travelers coming to Australia. So this campaign was designed to attract younger Australian travelers who weren't able to do their normal traveling overseas to come and explore New South Wales.
Combination of Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
Featured a series of short videos highlighting the experiences on offer in New South Wales.
Videos were fronted by well-known Australian musicians.
Developed curated Spotify playlists.
Used Instagram stories.
Results:
video views.
visits to New South Wales.
Two million hours spent with the content.
Increased user's desire to visit New South Wales.
Generated over $43,000,000 in income for regional New South Wales.
Social Media Trends
Continued growth in TikTok.
TikTok will become the most dominant social media platform.
Users spending 95 minutes per day on the platform.
% of users looking to TikTok for funny or entertaining content.
Political backlash may impact growth.
BeReal: growing in popularity in the 16 to 25 age group.
Growth and popularity of short form video.
Highly prioritized by algorithms on Instagram and several other social media platforms.
Developing basic simple video editing skills.
LinkedIn.
More personal content, not just professional job-oriented content.
Posts without links ranked a lot higher than is typically professional.
Personal organic content is favorited.
If you're developing LinkedIn content for an organization, don't make it all corporate. Bring in some of those little bit more workplace culture kind of posts and advice that could put you in good stead.
User-generated content will continue to grow.
Content created by real people or micro-influencers that promotes brands rather than the big high profile paid influencers seems to be a trend that a lot of organizations are getting on board with and that we are responding more positively to as consumers and followers of brands.