By Oscar Cramer
11.08.22
Social media has a crucial impact on our society as we know it today. Integrated into our daily live, it has molded just about everything we do, from waking up to check our phones to watching news and television. How social media affects public relations can determine how interactions with companies and brands go on, as well as a public image for the company as a whole. It also allows for brands to engage quickly and painlessly to their audience. You could say that social media is a two way street for companies to consumer relations, with both parties gaining some sort of profit in terms of information.
PR
Social media has expanded the amount of time we use the internet, and in turn increasing the amount of interactions we have between people. “Social media gives brands the opportunity to engage with consumers on a variety of channels, but with opportunity comes responsibility. The platforms have raised customer service expectations” (Matter, 2022). Now consumers are given the chance to always be interacting with brands, with an expectation from the brands audience to do the same. As more people use social media, more of the important information is put there first rather than a television station or newspaper, making it even more vital for companies and brands to monitor their social media channels.
The ways that social media affects advertising is also very important. Social media as well as the internet is run on advertisements, and without them would most of the time, die out. Getting advertisers to come and promote content is very important for social media, and a prime example of what that looks like is Twitter. Just recently, Twitter has come into the new ownership of Elon Musk, where radical changes to the company have been made since. Following these changes, huge companies like Coca-Cola and Volkswagon have pulled out of advertising on that platform.
Advertising
Another great example of a company that uses advertising to their advantage is YouTube. While YouTube does offer the standard free ad experience when watching videos, they know that people will pay to not see ads, and created their service, YouTube Premium. This cuts out advertisements on the platform while giving additional features to its paying customers like offline playback and downloading videos. With over 2.6 billion users worldwide, how many of these users pay for YouTube Premium? Only around 20 million people. “So that’s good money, sure, but that’s about 10% of the $28 billion dollars they made in that calendar year. So yeah, YouTube still runs on ads” (Brownlee, 2022). YouTube doesn’t collect all of the revenue for itself, as it has to pay creators on average a 55% cut of the advertisement. So YouTube really generated far more than 28 billion; nearly double.
Now, as the methods of marketing are becoming more merged and intertwined, it can be said that social media and public relations have become intertwined as well. Public relations has always been focused on ‘influential’ and important people that hold status, and those people moving to social media made them much more reachable to communicate with. “As both PR and social media are used to build and maintain trust in the company and their products, it is only natural that the two must be in sync” (Bates, n.d.).
Similarities
Some of the similarities between the two include that both models are based from communication, with social media making messages feel much more important since they are in real time. Through social media general information has broadened, making these real time communications be seen by many more than it would without the help of social media. Instead of public relations targeting specific individuals, businesses will instead target anyone that could be vital to their business models. Social media has made the idea of public relations more friendly and welcoming to people now more than ever. “Social media has made PR more “friendly” to all stakeholders of a business, resulting in a new area of marketing called “relationship marketing."" (Bates, n.d.)
Relationship marketing is “a facet of customer relationship management that focuses on customer loyalty and long-term customer engagement rather than shorter-term goals like customer acquisition and individual sales” (Aberle, 2019). Since businesses and brands are creating this sort of relationship between themselves and their consumers, it helps to create much stronger and emotional connections between consumers and brands.
Work Cited
Matter. (2022, September 6). 3 ways social media has changed public relations. 3 Ways Social Media Has Changed Public Relations. Retrieved November 8, 2022, from https://www.matternow.com/blog/3-ways-social-media-has-changed-public-relations/
Brownlee, M. (2022). Dear Twitter! Retrieved November 8, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1qsF0WQy8c&ab_channel=MarquesBrownlee
Bates, P. (n.d.). Why public relations should play a role in your social media marketing. Center for Social Impact Communication. Retrieved November 8, 2022, from https://csic.georgetown.edu/magazine/public-relations-play-role-social-media-marketing/
Aberle, L. (2019, July 17). What is relationship marketing? - definition from whatis.com. SearchCustomerExperience. Retrieved November 8, 2022, from https://www.techtarget.com/searchcustomerexperience/definition/relationship-marketing