Emilia Akulenko’s Weblog

PR in Social Media

Social Media became a major platform for Public Relation activities. We can estimate 5 important steps for PR manager:

1. Identify the goal of the company: the objective of the PR-campaign is a fundamental factor in determining the tools as well as social media sites.

Goals of the company can be:
- Niche branding
- Stimulation of sales
- Socio-oriented image
- Increase of occurrence in online media
- Creating a community of loyal users
- Establish an effective feedback from audiences
- Attracting targeted traffic
- Distribution of news on the Internet

2. The principle of “mutual exchange”. Effective PR in social networks requires close interaction with the audience and interaction, where both parties are satisfied. The reader will be happy with the message if he/she will get something in the return.

3. Be honest with audience. To build honest relationships with the audience. Feature of social networks is that users are very sensitive to any manifestation of insincerity. Anyone who suspects a trick, can immediately share this information with others. As a result, PR-campaign may give the opposite effect.

4. Keep distance at first. No familiarity. What is a community? It is a work team with its laws, foundations, traditions and folklore. Stranger, has a chance to become a full participant in the community only if he has a respect to these laws.

5. Clearly define the criteria of efficiency. PR-campaign can not be go good, bad or normal. It is just a subjective assessment of the overall bracket. In order to determine the effectiveness of the campaign, the criteria has to be defined for success:
- The number of advertising contacts: the approximate number of users who see the campaign materials.
- Number of publications in high-quality sources: RSS-aggregators, article directories, as well as Spam blog to quality sources do not.
- Number of entries (comments) on the publication: The indicator shows the level of interest of users to the information published.
- Ratio of positive / neutral / negative feedback
- Number of links to site / blog: there are references obtained as a result of the campaign.
- Number of subscribers to blog, fun pages etc.
- Number of participants to create a community.
- Number of visitors to the site / blog