The growth of Social Media - No end in sight!

Name: Christoph

Campus: LUCT

Every Friday morning, all the Maisberger  trainees meet for the so-called ‘Trainee Breakfast’ , a 1 hour meeting where all the Trainees have breakfast together and discuss about one specific topic, presented by a senior member of the Maisberger team. During my time as intern at Maisberger, I was invited to join the Trainee breakfast which was a great opportunity to broaden my horizon and get some more exposure of the real PR world. The topics covered while I was there ranged from ‘how to write the perfect media release’ or ‘how do I conduct interviews’ to ‘the importance of Social Media’. Since I find this topic very interesting and exciting and some of you already discussed the use of Social Media in your blog posts, I would like to share with you some facts & figures I learned from the 'Trainee Breakfast' which show the enormous potential of Social Networks for PR practitioners.

First of all, what actually is the definition of Social Media? Everyone talks about it, but how to describe it? Social Media platforms are characterized by two basic features:

- They are being used digitally

- Everyone can use them as receiver as well as sender of 'messages'

The second feature makes Social Media so distinctive from 'traditional' media, where there is a clear split between the role of receiver and sender.

So let’s talk about some interesting statistics of Social Media that show its importance and influence:

In Germany, 46.1 million people are online, spending 24 hours a month online on average.

76 % of those are registered on one or more Social Media platforms and among the age group 14 – 49, a staggering 96 % are members of at least one Social Network. 

This shows that through Social Networks, one can reach out to a vast amount of people that otherwise could not be targeted.

The world’s biggest Social Network as we all know is Facebook. Launched in 2004, it has more than 500 million active members worldwide, among them 19 million German users. 

50 % of Facebook users are younger than 35 years.

50 % of users follow 2 – 5 brands / organizations (like-button)

All these numbers just show what an important and influential role Facebook and other Social Media platforms will play in the upcoming years. I think it was never easier for PR practitioners to reach out to the (young) target group and get their messages across. 

However, this being said, an organization’s Social Media appearance is of course not automatically running successfully by itself. Many organizations start Social Media activities without having a clear strategy and concept. In my opinion, it is not sufficient to just open a Facebook account and put some posts about the organization / client, but PR practitioners must develop an individual strategy tailored to meet the organization’s goals and to reach out to a specific target group.

What do you guys think about the use of Social Media within Public Relations? Can you share any examples how you used Social Networks during your internship?