By: Azasyazana binti Azizan 2009698944
This article is about how to measure the impact of social media on public relations. As we all know, there are rapid development of new media in all field around the world. Almost every company have their own websites or blogs and any other social accounts in order to extend their connections with external public instead of internal public. They use these social media to reach their target audiences more effectively. A part from that, social media help a lot and provide further information globally. It is nowadays become significance especially for public relations. The public relations professionals have a tremendous opportunity to leverage social media outlets to enhance their outreach efforts. As social media sites become the source for news and breaking stories, marketers are seeing media coverage spread more rapidly than ever before.
The best way to show the impact is to look at how social media has affected the costs of marketing efforts. This can be accomplished by utilizing a few standard public relations, online advertising, search engine optimization and website metrics that can be combined to show a holistic view of the true value social media.
Six ways to track the impact of social media on public relations have been determined in order to evaluate public relations or they can be used across several marketing channels to show a cross-channel view of where social media is delivering.
First and foremost is cost per impression. Social media helps to expand the reach of your message and has a tremendous impact on the number of impressions that are generated for PR stories. Therefore, when the change in the cost per impression with and without social media has been showed, a compelling case for why social media efforts are crucial to the strategies can be determined. The second way is cost per engagement. Engagement is the one thing at which social media continues to beat every other marketing platform, time and time again. It’s almost unfair to compare social media engagement against other channels, because other marketing channels simply do not have as many opportunities to generate engagement. The aggregation on how people engaged with the content and divide it by the cost is to determine the cost per engagement. The third way is Cost per Click. Public relations can drive users to click on links that are shared through social media channels. It can be difficult to figure out the number of clicks generated from links shared by third parties, but you can calculate the number of clicks that were generated through your own messaging by using the stats from your URL shortener. The number four is through Cost per Site Visitor. Due to the nature of online sharing, it is common to see a spike in website traffic that surrounds PR outreach. Considering that companies pay a lot for online advertising to get visitors to their site, not measuring the cost per site visitor across channels is a missed opportunity to show a positive social media impact. Next is Cost per Inbound Link. While more companies strive to improve their search engine rankings, more public relations professionals are being asked to request “backlinks” in media articles. These backlinks drive traffic to the corporate website. Last but not least is Cost per Subscriber. When visitors make it to your website, it’s important to measure the actions they take. More and more companies are looking for ways to convert web traffic into “subscribers” who have provided their email address, allowing an additional opportunity for follow-up marketing efforts. Therefore, consider comparing the cost per subscriber across all of your marketing channels to understand how public relations is performing in relation to your overall marketing spend.
As a conclusion, these metrics are not traditional public relations metrics, but rather it can be utilized to create a cross-channel dashboard which will show how social media and public relations efforts complement each other and deliver inexpensive results. The results tend to be inexpensive because the incremental spend to capitalize on social media is usually very small.
