Marketing has always gone hand in hand with PR and in our new digital age of social communication we’re actually sitting on a pretty powerful PR weapon – Twitter.

So what is PR? Public relations (PR) is the practice of managing the spread of information between an individual or an organisation and the public.

In reality, you’re probably already doing a lot of it by simply tweeting and telling people what’s happening in your business. But we’re talking about going a bit deeper and using Twitter to really add something to your PR activities.

Lists

The List function on Twitter is the best place to start and allows you to monitor a number of things that are crucial to your PR success. Use the lists to:

1. Monitor your competitors – you need to know what they’re doing to stay in the game!
2. Find journalists who cover your industry – by listing them you can monitor what they tweet about and get a conversation
3. Reverse it – check who is listing you and on what lists to find out how your brand is being perceived

Crisis Management

There are times when Twitter provides a highly useful and effective alternative to that mainstay of media relations – the press release. When David Cameron alleged that Jimmy Carr was tax dodging he turned to Twitter. Five years ago there would have been a press release and a short statement delivered via a carefully chosen news channel. Jimmy Carr put his statement out on Twitter, even though it took five tweets to get the full apology out. Although Carr didn’t emerge entirely unscathed it was broadly agreed that he did a good job of defusing the story. The information got to the people it needed to (his fans) immediately and acting fast helped with damage limitation.

Content

I mentioned above that you’re probably doing a lot of your PR through Twitter already. It used to be that if you wanted to let people know what was going on in the company you had to write a press release, now you can tweet. But the key is to have a flexible strategy so that you can schedule some of your content and allow for content that is real-time and potentially reactive as well. This combination will allow for a better flow of information from your company to the public

Overall, Twitter is a very powerful PR weapon when used correctly, so check through and see where you could make change to optimise your PR.

What do you think? Let us know in the comment box below.

By Harriet Thacker

Harriet is a marketing expert, social media enthusiast and Shake Social’s champion blogger. Struggling to maintain your own blog? We can help!