Chris asks…

How can I use social media for publicity?

Rebecca says…

There are many ways for you to utilise social media to engage the public and the media to pay attention to your message.

For the traditionalist online networker, you cannot go past LinkedIn. This tool provides many avenues to display your news. Firstly you could send important news through internal contacts via a personalised information email, or secondly you could post your news items on your Blog and attach it to your profile (LinkedIn is associated with Word Press, a free blog creation tool, which can be placed on the home page of your profile in LinkedIn for linking and easy reference purposes). Spend some time in the learning centre that LinkedIn provides to find out more great ways to communicate.

Alternatively you can keep people up to date with Twitter. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the details, Twitter is a service developed to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question – What are you doing? You have 140 characters to get your important message to key people who follow you on the service. While still in its infancy compared to the likes of Facebook or LinkedIn, this tool is swiftly gaining credibility with high profile users including Kevin Rudd, Malcolm Turnbull and almost every news outlet in Australia.

Finally there is Facebook, a tried and tested friend to the small business. This tool allows you to develop your own group, you invite people to join your group, and you then send your group quality information about your business. Whether it is an event invitation, important news, upgrades to services or product launches, Facebook is a well known and well used tool for both personal and professional PR.

While I am sure this is not the quintessential list of all social media that could assist with PR, they are the key social media outlets that you should be taking notice of to ensure your message gets to the right people in a timely manner!