Why Use Twitter For Digital PR

PR, also known as Public Relations, is a powerful tool allowing businesses and brands to achieve that all-important exposure they’re looking for. PR gives a voice to those with unique selling points and where better to have that done than on Twitter? Here are some top tips as curated by Surge Marketing Solutions.

The Hard Facts

Twitter voices over 350 million active users worldwide and is known for it’s consistency with one thing: giving the people a platform to converse. Twitter is an ideal digital tool for PR due to its conversational, relaxed platform, which is why so many journalists prefer it over other tools.

Following on from this, from studies and conversations with journalists, more than half of journalists online actually prefer Tweets and Twitter DM’s than being emailed press releases. Their reasoning is due to how straightforward it has become to check messages, head over to Twitter accounts and check out what PRs and brands are conversing with.

Moreover, as with any digital campaign, PR can be very lengthy and takes effort to curate quality pitches, making Twitter a great place to be. There are a multitude of conversations happening on Twitter at any given time of the day, which is again, reflected in the number of active users. Thus, brands should continually monitor their newsfeeds, checking hashtags and topics as these are what will help them gradually secure coverage.

Likewise, Surge recommends curating a feed that speaks to your brand values. It’s important to do this so in the eyes of the journalist, you’re the real deal. This is how you will begin to build connections. One of the most important things to take note of is that it’s vital to keep away from connecting with people that don’t serve the purpose that you’re looking for. Any spam accounts should be removed and never interacted with.

Improved Branding

As you’re now aware, Twitter is an extremely fast platform that is used by a ton of journalists and news outlets. This therefore makes it the perfect place to keep up to date with changes and latest news. It’s vital that you can take out clusters of time everyday to scroll your feed to ensure you’re not missing out on anything vital. In this way, Twitter can actually become your go-to platform (and it’s free!) as it offers great sources of inspiration when in need of new ideas.

Become an Expert

Following on from the previous point - it’s great having a newsfeed full of journalists and relevant experts and brands, but you really need to focus on becoming an expert in your field, too. An example of this is staying active by checking DM’s, conversing with others that are within your niche, sharing latest updates and baring in mind your overall brand values before you tweet.

Always ensure that you are looking through your Twitter feed often and detox as and when necessary. Make sure to spruce your account and your newsfeed from time to time with new connections and build new followers by sharing new trends.

Making Use of Twitter Lists

And lastly, those all-important lists on Twitter that people are always talking about. These are beneficial as they allow brands to categorise feeds that they follow. This can be anyone from journalists, press, blogs, PR’s, etc. To explain, lists can help brands and businesses to categories and split apart relevant accounts, i.e. adding experts into a split list, adding journalists into another list and brands into its own list.

All in all, digital PR on Twitter is still an underrated concept, but we’re confident it will explode in the coming years - so jump on it before others do. It’s crucial that you are managing your personal brand and curating it to speak to your values. By doing so, you can become an expert in your own field, and one day you may have journalists sliding into your DMs without you having to put in the work.