What does your PR strategy look like? Does it involve video, social, events, monitoring the news- a collaboration between them all. Or is there an area you haven’t tackled yet?
Although it can seem overwhelming, Facebook can be a great opportunity for PR. A place to connect with current and potential customers, gain interest (and insight), promote content and keep fans updated. So what are you waiting for?
How can you involve Facebook in your PR strategy?
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1. Access To Data
One of the benefits of so many people connecting and logging into Facebook is the amount of data Facebook can collect on everyone. Facebook knows everything you would ever want to know about your audience, but that doesn’t mean they are just going to hand it over to you. One of the best ways to get to learn about your audience is by creating content and ads on the platform.
When you go through the motions of creating a Facebook AD, you will see just how specific or general your audience can be. From demographics, job titles, interests, liked pages, and even importing your list of emails to create an audience.
But how do this help your PR strategy?
Through the creation of your ad and then the response of your selected audience, you can learn a lot.
Maybe you aren’t getting a response at all? That means you’ve targeted the wrong people.
Maybe you are getting a lot of clicks but no other social engagement such as likes, comments, or shares? That means your target audience is interested in your product, but they aren’t going to be very engaged on Facebook
Maybe you are getting a lot of social engagement, but no one is clicking your ad? That means your audience is active Facebook users, but they aren’t going to leave the site to take a further look at your product.
You can learn some much about your audience by spending a little bit of money on Facebook. And understanding your audience is the first step to any well-run PR campaign.
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2. Find And Connect With Your Audience
There is something for everyone on Facebook. While some demographics appear stronger than others, billions of people are still active on the site, and they have at least 1 billion active users every month. Those facts are pretty hard to compete with.
However, when it comes to building your brand on Facebook you aren’t there to reach everyone, you are there to first and foremost find your audience- and the good news is a lot of them should be on Facebook. Use the research you have already done when creating your customer and apply it Facebook. Their age, gender, income, location, family unit, etc.
Now that you know who your audience is you now have to understand how they use the site.
- Are they active?
- Do they like, comment, share, promote and brands?
- Or are they there just to connect with family and friends?
- Or is Facebook the place they come to learn and keep up with what’s going on?
This means you are going to take the time to listen and understand their overall vibe on the website. As exciting as it to start creating content you need to make sure you take time observing too. This will help understand what your audiences expected behavior would be to your content and how you will know if you are creating something that is connecting with them.
Once you know how they are using the social site, you then want to develop your brand’s Page. When creating your Page and coming up with your content strategy, you need to ask:
What is my desired outcome?
And this should be based on the observations you have made about your audiences actions (or inactions) on Facebook.
- Are you going to use Facebook to promote content?
- To create content (live video, 360, stores)?
- Build awareness around your brand?
- Connect with influencers and bloggers to partner with?
- Advertising?
- Promoting sales and contests?
Before you do anything else, you need to understand what your own expectations are for the Page so you can understand if it matches with the content you want to create and the content your audience will respond to.
3. Old Fashion Promotion
Now that you have done you research found your audience and gathered lots of data about them you can create a plan to keep them coming back to your Page.
The good news is Facebook can fill the gaps caused by declining traditional media, such as newspapers and TV or when reporters just won’t pick up their phone. You don’t have to wait for someone to become interested in your story based off of a short pitch, or worry about the decline in newspaper subscriptions! You can create the story yourself and share it on Facebook.
Of course, this won’t mean much unless you have completed the two steps above. Just creating a Facebook Page is not enough to gain traction. Like everything else in PR understanding your audience and having the data to back it up is also important.
Wrap It Up
With access to so much do you ever feel like you a more of a brand communicator than a PR pro? After all, PR isn’t just about handling crisis and chaos, it’s about building and promoting a brand image that is vulnerable to the 24/7 news cycle. And we think Facebook is the perfect place to gain back some of that control.
Looking for some more tips and tricks for Facebook and other social sites? Then download this FREE e-book, 30 Social Tests, here.
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