Leverage Your PR Coverage with Social Media

Pause for a second and imagine this situation: you launched a press campaign you worked so hard on and the coverage comes back and it’s fantastic… The reviews are amazing, the bloggers’ photos are beautiful, the spreads are gorgeous. This all means the work’s done now, right? There’s nothing else to do. People will just flock to your business – that’s what they’ve always done!

If this situation sounds familiar, it’s because it’s how a lot of people behave after a successful PR campaign. They send out the release, handle the requests, and then sit back and enjoy the positive coverage.

Most of the time, that’s good enough – but when you do this, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to turbocharge your brand.

If your brand is active on social media – and it should be – you’ll know how hard (and expensive) it is to constantly generate fresh content.

Thankfully, that great PR campaign you’ve just run has left you with a pile of content that’s perfect for use all across social media. All these lovely words, photos, and thoughts can be repurposed into endless amounts of meaningful posts, tweets, and Instagrams.

To help you increase the value of your PR coverage with social media, we’ve prepared a really handy 2-step guide that tells you all you need to know to really turn up the heat when it comes to making the most of your press coverage.

 

Step 1: Sharing the Content

This is the quickest and easiest step, but one that you’ll be surprised to know people often forget.

Resharing the coverage you’ve received across social media is an incredibly important way of not only showing off who’s written about you but also amplifying the impact of the coverage.

Resharing the coverage is very easy to do: just grab a link to the article (if it’s online), add a quick note, and share it out as a Facebook post or Tweet.

Here’s an example of a post we at Maade did for Flour & Grape.

If it’s a print article, take a nice photo of it on your phone or camera (make sure you can actually read the article!) and add it to a post.

While this may seem like you’re bragging (and, let’s face it, that’s part of it), resharing the coverage you’ve received is an incredibly helpful way of building your brand’s credibility. If a major national publication has written about you, it means you’re worthy of being written about, and therefore worthy of buying from!

What’s more, in this age of self-promotion, most people aren’t put off by brands who shout about the great things being said about them.

Step 2: Repurposing the Coverage

Now that you’ve shared the coverage you’ve received, it’s time to repurpose it. Repurposing is a really useful and effective way of making coverage go further. It’s all tied up in taking bits out of articles, reviews, and blog posts and making them into other things.

The best things to repurpose are quotes, photos, star ratings, and (if you’re lucky) videos.

All you need to do to repurpose them is take out the quote, photo, or star rating and create a brand new post for your social media using only that bit as the content.

A great way to do this is to take a short quote, grab an image of your brand or product, and combine the two by adding the text on top of the photo. You can do this in Photoshop or InDesign, but if you’re not skilled with those you can also use Canva or Pablo.

Here’s an example we at Maade created for La Tagliata using a TripAdvisor review.

When you create your image, be sure to use the same colours and fonts that you use for your brand.

The benefit of repurposing the coverage into something like this is that it, 1: gives you fresh new content to fill your feed with, and 2: helps boost your credibility even more in a short, snappy way.

When you repurpose your content on social media, be sure to tag the original source in your post. This not only helps to give them credit but also increases your chance of being reposted to their social media accounts. Being reposted can help increase the value of your PR coverage even more!

 

Are You Ready to Increase the Value of Your PR Coverage?

The two steps above are the quickest ways to increase the value and impact of your PR coverage using social media. Together, they would only take the best part of an hour or two to put together, but the impact can be massive. Reposting and repurposing the coverage you receive helps to build your brand and increase the number of people who read the great things written about you.

If you aren’t re-posting and repurposing your content, you’re throwing easy opportunities to boost your brand away. Ask yourself, in this competitive market, can you afford to do that?

 

 

Matthew Rose is the founder and director of Maade, a digital marketing and content agency for the hospitality industry.