This is an archived blog from when I ran Conscious Public Relations Inc. from 2008-2018. Excuse the potential outdated-ness!
How to engage when media post about you on social media
It occurred to me after a recent campaign and a conversation about Publicity vs. Social Media yesterday that companies are still thinking of social media as separate from PR. Social media is a PR tool, and a powerful one at that. Even if you are not hiring a publicist – or someone to do your social media – you should always think about how the two practices can be integrated.
For example, as part of our services with publicity clients, we will post media coverage on their social media outlets for them. One extra step that the client could do is follow and scan the media outlet’s Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram feeds to see whether the published story was also posted onto their social media outlets. It’s not always the case, but almost guaranteed for online outlets. Since their stories are online, posting the links on their social networks are an easy way to get traffic to the site.
Vancity Buzz posted a story about the upcoming Korean Cultural Heritage Festival on their Facebook page. It’s gotten great engagement already within the first hour of it being posted. If you were the organizer of the event or the PR company representing them, one additional way to engage with potential attendees is to post a comment thanking the outlet for the story, and scan the comment section for questions or additional comments relevant to you. You never know if there’s someone who’s too lazy to click on the link and read about the event, and wants to just go and buy tickets to attend. Posting your ticket link as a reply to their comment would be an easy way to facilitate the buying process.
Earlier this year, we secured an interview for Kaare of the Say Hi to a Stranger Weekend on CBC, which gets some pretty decent traffic to its website. We found that the comments that were posted as a response to her video interview were very good observational data for what the general public thought about the movement. So don’t forget the comments, either! The only thing I wouldn’t recommend doing is responding heavily to comments. Even if someone is “trolling” and not saying nice stuff about you or your event, let it go and only answer questions. Don’t waste your energy on trolls.
So, is a post just a post when it comes to measuring results? Almost never. Consider the residual audiences that exist after that article, blog post, or interview gets posted online and on social media. Then jump on the opportunity to engage further with them.
