Your Social Media Efforts

Social Media is becoming increasingly important in how Public Relations practicioners connect with their publics. For a client, it is sometimes hard to convince them that social media is worth the time, but Ragan.com is looking to convenience them otherwise.

First, Ragan suggests, you have to understand how social media is going to benefit the client and their organizations. To do this you have to be aware of the company’s missions and goals and also be understanding of the clients wishes.

Secondly you have to know what you can deliver. Knowing what to measure in social media is key, not only to a relationship between you and your client, but a binding contract. You have to know if your social media efforts are working and if they’re not working, you need to figure out what to change, which all comes back to what you can measure.

In addition to knowing how to measure your social media presence, you also need to know how it is contributing to the bottom line by calculating the ROI (return on investment).  This is sometimes difficult to measure with social media, but finding a correlation between the content you’re producing and sales in the company, will become increasingly important.

Thirdly, share social media data in common language. Sometimes social media can sound like Morse code to clients. So, a suggestion would be to explain the data with charts. A visual that your client can understand without any terms can sometime be best to see how your work is contributing to their bottom line.

Lastly, sometimes your efforts can not be measured in numbers, however you can show your clients your efforts and provide an anecdote. Say a fan left a comment on your client's company page expressing how the company is doing a great job can be worth showing a client even if you can’t prove how it contributes to sales.