PR Experts: 3 Tips to Create More Effective Content for Social Media Marketing

As a PR Expert, you know the challenge you face to engage markets that are on many different social sites. According to research in the US, around 80% of the population have at least one social network profile. Coming up with quality content in social media that will attract more followers and interact with customers. As a graduate student at Northwestern University studying Integrated Marketing Communications, I have found two great articles below highlighting the importance of content marketing in PR world.

“3 trends PR pros should embrace in 2017” by Christopher Penn for Shift Communications

Christopher in his article shows three mega-trends that will influence on PR industry this year. He mentioned that more content created than ever before. They found 72 million news online stories written in 2016 and is expected to continue expanding in the coming year. Besides, Christopher also highlighted that influencer marketing is quickly becoming one of the most important online marketing channels. Today influencer marketing is on the huge rise and tends to listen and build a strong relationship with consumers. Certainly, companies really need content marketing, and PR can help create a great content marketing strategy and build trust and credibility.

 

Source: SEO Content Specialists

“PR Content Strategy: Let’s Talk Shop!” by Gini Dietrich for Spin Sucks

The second article explains the applicability of content marketing in public relations. Unlike the company messaging or traditional advertising, Gini thinks the strong content marketing can build brand awareness, loyalty, and trust. In addition, she also emphasized how to identify content that will resonate with audiences and drive engagement. To sum up, PR content strategy can deeply understand brands’ ideal customers and drive company growth.

Recommendations

Based on the sights in these two articles and my studies at Medill, I listed three key learnings from PR contents strategy that can help PR pros to be successful in social media marketing world:

l   Make It Easy to Share - Influencer marketing taps into the power of writers who are well-known by brand’s audiences and uses their influence to spread the article. Adding social sharing buttons and making it far easier for influencer or audiences to share content.

l   Use the Storytelling to Connection - Great stories attract attention. We always say people forget facts, but they never forget a great story. Telling story can be a fantastic way to have a deeper and more meaningful social media conversation and successfully connect with brands’ target audiences.

l   Embrace PESO Model - We have the content and we can use shared media to spread it, paid media to extend it, and earned media to hand-stamp it. Overall, PESO model is a great tool to help PR pros to find the success they can build on. 

Next time you developing a PR piece, remember these three action items to create successful social media content.

I-Chuan Hsu currently is a Master of Science Candidate in Integrated Marketing Communications program at Medill-Northwestern University, as well as a marketer experienced in Los Angeles for 2 years. She is graduating in December 2017 and is interested in data analytics and International Marketing. Feel free to connect with her at @florina_hsu or LinkedIn here.