The Agency and I(ntern) – Part 2 Updates and Social Media

The Agency and I(ntern) – Part 2 Updates and Social Media 

Hi there people,

From my calculations, we should be around the halfway mark of our internship!! Hope everybody is hanging in there and doing well.

Happy to share that last week I had the golden opportunity of attending a B2B event, ‘The Internet Show Asia 2013’ together with my colleagues. This event is for businesses in the technological industry, specifically the internet and mobile sector. Attending this event was an enriching and insightful experience that has given me new found knowledge which has significantly bolstered my understanding of how public relations work in the B2B community. It has also helped me a lot since my agency’s expertise lies in the IT industry. I am really glad for this opportunity from Eastwest PR.

Last week I mentioned I will be talking about social media for this blog post. I realized during the course of my internship that I do not know how to use social media for businesses or my retainers/ clients. Additionally, school does not really have an opportunity to teach us that and I believe that it is only when you truly have to experience it first-hand to understand these guidelines that has been repeated so commonly all the time. So for my fellow interns and new interns to come, I will be sharing on what to take note when doing social media for businesses.

Social Media for Businesses

Before I continue, would like to promote my blog post for my PR agency, Eastwest PR. Feel free to have a look and comment. It is also on the topic of social media. http://goo.gl/1HZDC

Social media has now become a must-have for businesses as we are currently in the midst of a technology era so to speak, where communication, networking and practically everything under the sun is done via social media on a daily basis. Hence, for PR practitioners, handling social media for businesses has since become one of our daily task and service offerings. It is therefore important to take note of the following guidelines/ reminders when doing social media for businesses.

1.       Understand your client and their business, know the communication strategy.

In order to be in the position to do social media for your clients, you need to know what they are doing, how they want to be seen and perceived. That is basic. However to manage their social media accounts well, you need to be able to represent them at all times regarding different issues and situations without going to them for advice all the time. For example, how would your client want to react to a certain type of news? Is it to leverage to create possible business opportunities or create a certain type of image?

2.       Ensure that what you are writing serves a purpose or is in line with the business.

If you happen to be in a fashion industry or your client is, write things that can link back to fashion. For example if your client deals with B2B customers, there is really no point writing a blog post on B2C customers or giving B2C examples. Ask yourself constantly, does this help my client in any way? Also, play with keywords and constantly have keywords in headings and titles so there will be presence and the search engines can pick it up.

3.       Focus on the benefits not the brand. Be cautious and safe.

When doing social media, try to think how does your client businesses help benefit the audience. This is the correct content creation rather than focusing on promoting the brand name or spamming related or useful links created by others. Putting up things that promotes how your client can benefit the audience makes them more credible and builds a social community. Anything else is just clutter and irresponsible posting.

Think twice before putting anything up and always check that you are on the right account. Although convenient and easy to manage, avoid using social media management systems such as HootSuite. This is because you may post the wrong things on the wrong account and once it is online there is no going back, damage has been done even if you delete the erroneous post. It is still safer to do it the traditional way of logging in and logging out.

Hope the above three guidelines help improve your social media management. Maybe schools should consider making this a core assignment. Helps a lot in the real world.