The 5 reasons the best social media managers aren’t marketers

For example: advertising is one of marketing’s well-known tools and as we know, costs A LOT of money. While in PR, our key weapon is editorial coverage and aside from lots of cups of coffee, and maybe the occasional lunch, editorial coverage is free. As is speech writing, community engagement, advocacy, media relations, stakeholder management, and of course – organic social media.

How to adopt PR principles in this new era of social media strategy?

Here are my 5 recommendations on how anyone can use PR to grow a loyal community of fans on your social accounts:

1. It’s all about communication: the first rule I learnt as a PR student was that for brands to be successful, you had to foster a 2-way communications. Unlike marketing which was considered a 1-way form of communication where the company talked and the consumer was expected to listen, in PR it’s about both parties talking and listening. In social media world, your customers want to engage with you and will do so any way they can, so it’s best to have those conversations on platforms/accounts you can control. The last thing you want is to ignore your community and have them talk crap about you on another page or account, where you don’t have the opportunity to engage with them without causing further damage to your brand’s reputation.

2. Partnerships are important: a huge part of what PR specialists do is manage partnerships – whether its sponsors, media, competitors, like-minded businesses – we recognise how important these relationships are. And for your brand and business, utilising your partnerships on socials can go a long way to build trust with your existing and potential customers. Why? Because when another business vouches for you, their loyal customers will immediately trust you too (in fancy terms it’s called buy-in). So work on building partnerships behind the scenes with aligned businesses so you can both leverage off each other to grow your following and your customer base.

3. Negative publicity can be a good thing: And no, not in a ‘all publicity is good publicity’. I mean that it offers an opportunity to review what you’re doing and why it’s not resonating with your customers. If you get trolled by some random that’s nothing to worry about; but if your loyal customers, and other online audience members start speaking up and against your content, it’s a sign to step back and understand where you might have gone wrong. If often stems back to not being aligned to your audience’s values which creates confusion and sometimes mistrust in your brand. Which leads to…

   

4. You have to engage with people: it can be the best, and worst part of PR, especially when you have to engage with the haters. But it’s one of the core principles of PR and is how strong relationships are built. Engaging with haters online can be scary, as you miss out on body language and tone of voice. However just like engaging in real life you may not walk away agreeing on things, but you’ll both respect each other (hopefully) just that little bit more and that hater may just end up being your biggest advocate, which in my opinion is worth more than having 10k followers!

5. Honesty is really the best policy: PR specialists get unfairly called ‘spin doctors’ thanks to the early pioneers who probably do just a little bit of spin to get their clients some positive publicity! But newer generations of PR professionals know that lying is a huge no-no in our industry. And the same goes for social media, as recently seen by the spate of US influencers admitting to lying about their content in the wake of the 24 hour TikTok ban, and the backlash it produced. Honest and authentic content has been on the rise the past 2 years, and it’s a powerful way to build connection and trust with your online audience and customers.