What is social media?

Social media is a necessary tool to successful PR campaigns

Social media is about conversations, community, and connecting with your audience. It’s not just a broadcast channel or marketing tool. You need to be authentic and candid with your audience to make a connection.

Social media is also known as shared media, which is user-generated content that can be shared on multiple platforms with friends, family, business associates, and buyers of your products and services. Social media users want to be informed, entertained, and connected with other users. To this end, you must customize each post so it is native to each platform. For example, you wouldn't post the same content on Instagram as you would on Facebook because the tone, audience, and demographics are different.

Social media allows you to hear what people say about you and your brand and enables you to respond and engage with your audience. Companies use social media platforms as their primary communication channel with their audience and within their company.

Before you engage with your audience, you should always listen first and speak second. Try to understand your followers and what type of content they want to see from you. Don’t be afraid to try new things, such as posting more or less frequently on your social platforms or using videos and infographics as your content instead of photos.

Experimenting with new methods is a good way to improve, but think through your efforts before rolling them out.

Remember to cater your posts to the platform you want to share your content on. Creating engaging content that is native to the platform is important to deliver the right messages to your audience. Instagram is great for lifestyle photography and should be formatted differently than a tweet.

Axia Public Relations uses news, social, and web media for our PR strategies and programs. Social media is not the only type of media you should use in a PR campaign, but it’s essential if you want successful campaign results.