In recent years, social media marketing has drastically created an impact on everyone’s lives. Everybody from a baby boomer to a millennial, everyone is engaged with at least one social media platform. It has become a new way of word-of-mouth marketing now. But if it is for the general public then why do all the companies and businesses are getting themselves involved in social media marketing? According to them, they are doing this to build a relationship with the target audiences and stay in the positive limelight among them. But, don’t you think this is the job of a leading PR firm?
In modern times, various marketing areas are intertwined just like in the case of Public Relations (PR) and social media. The major purpose of a leading PR firm is to gain the attention of influential people, business partners, investors, shareholders, target audiences, etc. for their respective clients and they are now available on social media platforms. Hence, PR agencies are using this platform for their PR purposes. It is easier to get both the techniques synced together as the final motive for both is the same i.e., to build and maintain the trust of the company and its brand.
Impact of social media on Public Relations
- Social media helped in making PR more impactful and powerful. Both of them are communication-based but social media provides a real-time communication platform that makes the PR more impactful and stronger. With the help of social media, you can get instant replies to your news releases, emails, and other PR-related means. Also, the news can be spread faster with the help of social media than other platforms.
- Social media has gone too far now with millions of users using the platform. This gives brownie points to the PR agency as through social media, a brand and services can be spread among millions of target audiences within seconds. Previously, PR was targeted at specific investors and business partners but to grow the business it is important to expand the target audience which is the main purpose of PR.
- Previously, people used to think about the stakeholders and other business people to be very serious and not easily approachable. But social media made this relationship more friendly and helped the companies in being more inviting, warm, and approachable to the target audiences. This gave rise to a new term called “relationship marketing”.
- The way of communicating through PR is different from social media. The approach and tone of PR professionals while sending a message about the company is always different from social media executive as social media messaging is to influence the sales while PR approach is more on building the trust of the target audiences.
- Social media audiences are always more engaging than PR audiences as mostly PR audiences interact directly and passively. The content put on the social media is directly for the user engagement but content put out for PR simply goes out to the audience with little or no engagement.
