Dos and Don’ts in Social Media PR Campaigns

Dos

· Know your audience: You have to know their wants, needs and desires and by knowing them you will find the appropriate way to communicate your message.

· Choose your social media platform: Depending on the age, education and overall who is your target audience, you will have to choose a medium. For instance, you won’t be choosing Snapchat if you want to address to over 40s. You will use Facebook.

· Use more than one social media platforms: The majority of users have more than one social media accounts. You should try to combine them in order to achieve further awareness.

· Be active. Be personal. Be immediate: interact with the users. Make campaigns that welcome the participation of your audience. React to their comments and answer to their messages.

· Spice it up: Use memes and visuals in order to attract more people.

Don’ts

· Do not follow everyone: There is a saying in greek “show me your friend to tell you who you are”. Not everybody is suitable for your campaign. Follow the ones who really are important for your cause.

· Do not spam: posting all the time or using online ads to promote your campaigns can really irritate the audiences and have the opposite effects from the ones you want. They might unfollow you and tell others to do it also.

· Do not forget to spell-check: having a clean and grammatically correct post, shows professionalism and trustworthiness. Always double check your work before you send it away to cyber-space.

· Do not be a know-it-all: there might be a time -or more than once, that you will have to interact with some people who have different opinions. Open a discussion and try to be friendly with them and state your arguments in a polite way if needed.

· Do not overdue it with the hashtags: it is true that is important to use hashtags. However, using to many could seem tiring, needy and as a form of spam. Include the hashtag of your campaign and one or two more. In any case they should be relevant.

Danai Koutretsi