Social Media Marketing is a whole discipline on its own. But when it comes to PR if your target audience is using social media, then you have to be using it to. For most companies and active and interesting social media presence is a must. your target audience will expect it, you can get a decent handle of how important social is in your industry. By comparing news coverage with social media coverage of the same story, you'll almost certainly find that social coverage is much more active, much more engaging and much more likely to go viral. In this section, you'll learn how best to use social media for PR.

And you'll also learn which social networks are best for which techniques. There are a number of ways to harness the power of social media for your PR strategy. And these include industry research, finding trends, gauging the Zeitgeist understanding what people are Thinking or saying, audience research, understanding whether your audience uses the social network and how best to engage with them. Journalist relations, many journalists use social media extensively. So joining the Facebook group following them on Twitter or Instagram, subscribing to their podcasts and YouTube channels is a really great way to understand them better. It's also often a great way to contact them directly, as they will likely get fewer approaches via social than they do by email.

Promoting content. Social is an excellent way to promote your earned earned or bought content and getting your message in front of more people. You can do this through organic promotion or paid promotion, where you effectively advertise on social media, publishing content, as well as promoting your media relations results. You can also use social media as a platform for promoting your own content products and services. For example, a YouTube channel or an Instagram account or a medium publication. Building profile using social media to promote your company and build your community of followers or fans.

In this section, I'll give you a high level overview of how to use some of the top social networks as part of your PR strategy. But really the best way to learn about social networks is to use them yourself. LinkedIn is the professional social network. It's most popular with b2b marketers. In fact, half of all traffic to b2b websites and blogs comes from LinkedIn. However, keep in mind that LinkedIn users only spend about 17 minutes a month on the platform, so it's hard to catch them.

Tips, have a great company profile, have a great personal profile, and get recommendations and endorsements. Reddit, Reddit describes itself as the front page of the internet. It's made up of communities or channels called subreddits. The users of Reddit are yen around 64% are between 18 and 29%. To Pew and two thirds are male. But Reddit users spend around 15 minutes a day browsing through the site, so it's a good opportunity to catch that demographic.

Here's some tips for using Reddit. Keep it authentic. Reddit is not very forgiving of self promotional content. And Reddit is all about anonymity, which does make it a little bit tricky. As you never know quite who your users are. Twitter, Twitter users tend to be between 20 and 50 years old.

Almost half of them use it every day. And three quarters say they use Twitter to get the news 68%. That's more than two thirds of journalists use Twitter to find stories, and 74% user to research stories which makes Twitter a really great network for connecting with journalists. Some tips for using Twitter 80% of Twitter users are doing so from a mobile device. So make sure any content you share is mobile. Well friendly, and video and image content does really well on Twitter.

Facebook, facebook has a huge user base across all adult age groups. And users tend to spend around 35 minutes a day on Facebook. The other great thing about Facebook is that it has amazing targeting on its advertising platform, where you can really drill down to location, age and other demographics, Facebook tips, use images and videos. They're extremely effective. But remember, a lot of people watch video with the sound off. So if you're using video content on Facebook, you need to make sure that it makes sense without sound, Instagram.

Almost two thirds of Instagram users are female, and they are primarily in the under 40 age group, with the majority under 30. Instagram works best for visual consumer products and location based products. The most popular hashtags on Instagram are love cute, me and Instagram Instagram tips. user generated content works really well. And if you focus on culture and social issues, your campaign will likely be quite successful. Instagram is great for promoting events and infographics can work really well.

YouTube 62% of YouTube users are male, and the average viewing session is around 14 minutes. The most popular topics are beauty for women and sports for men. YouTube users tend to be in the 18 to 34 demographic. How to shocking and entertaining videos do really well on YouTube. And it's important if you're promoting your own channel to connect with others. There are a number of other social networks that you might want to look into.

For example, Snapchat is a useful channel for targeting the end of 30s. Most users a female template is strong with teens with entertainment, fashion, food and art being the most popular topics Pinterest is also a majority female network with millennials making up the bulk of the user base, art supplies and hobby or top Pinterest topics. medium is a blogging platform that offers a great way to engage directly with journalists and publish your content to be discovered. medium is great for b2b campaigns. Social media is absolutely critical to any digital PR campaign. But don't just use social for the sake of it.

It's important to understand who you're targeting and how they use social before you incorporate social into your strategy. Well done, you're more than halfway through the course. In the next section, you're going to learn about some of the other PR tactics that you should consider when designing your PR strategy.