Five reasons why news coverage is better than social media for your business

It can be tempting to turn to social media when we want to shout about ourselves. It’s quick and incredibly efficient. But does that mean it’s the best choice for your long-term strategy, or even your mid-term strategy?

Tbh, even social media isn’t the quick win it seems without proper planning, so if you need to sit down and get ideas on paper first, we’re always going to vote for PR activity over other types of marketing.

Why? In short, because it works. PR is the longest-established branch of communications choices, and while combining your marketing activities is always a solid option, choosing just one brings PR out on top every time.

It’s authentic, it’s trusted, and its effects are long-lasting.

Let’s hover on that for a moment. How does it hang around, exactly?

Long-lasting

When you get press coverage, there’s more often than not an online trail. Even if the coverage is in print, its online sibling will be there, boosting your SEO and bringing traffic to your website in a completely organic fashion. You get the immediate benefit of eyes on your brand, and an additional kick to the longer game of search-street cred. It’s a win win.

Trusted

The most glaringly obvious comparison between PR and social content, however, is the author, and more to the point, the trust we can place on them. If you hear from a brand directly via its social channels, you know its messages are biased, because an internal team member wrote them. PR, on the other hand? That content is attached to a named journalist – someone who has nothing to do with your brand. And if they’re saying good things about you (and it’s PR’s job to make sure they are!), you automatically have a trusted, unbiased source of information your audience is accessing.

Content, content, content

Now, when we talk about marketing activities going hand in hand, PR and social media can be a match made in heaven. With a solid campaign delivering steady coverage, you automatically gain things you can shout about and celebrate with your social media followers. Think along the lines of, “Look at us, we were on Radio1 this week!”. Your audience will want to celebrate with you, interact with your campaign, and listen all the more closely to your messages as a result.

Listen up

We’re all guilty of spending too much time scrolling. Can you spend 30 minutes on Twitter and tell someone what you read? Did you really absorb anything in great detail? Probably not, because when we’re scrolling social media, we’re looking for something to offer us a break from another task, or just fill a gap and let our thumbs do the hard work. We’re not actively taking things in. On the flip side, what state are our brains in when we absorb news? We’re either dedicated to watching TV, listening to a podcast, reading an article with commitment to it (because it takes longer than a few seconds) or actively searching for longer-form content than social media offers us. This stuff sinks in. It feels more important, and therefore it becomes more important.

Say it all

Speaking of longer-form content – can you plot out everything you have to say about your brand? Can you communicate its history, its ethos, commitment and current focus, concisely and effectively? Not on social media, you can’t. On platforms designed for bitesize info, you have to make a choice. Spare the detail. Get the essential things across. Bitesize, bitesize, bitesize. Where’s the room to set the tone, hear from experts, get several quotes in and lay the foundations of a great story? We’ll tell you – it’s in PR.

Here for the TLDR? Here you go:

• PR is long-lasting thanks to its SEO benefits

• It has a stronger, unbiased reputation your audience can trust

• Press coverage creates topics for social media

• It gets in front of your audience when they have a longer attention span

• It lets you get more info across, builds a story and creates opportunity to take your audience down a well-laid path

At Lucky North, we’re PR experts – it’s 100% of who we are and what we do. But we see the strengths of the whole comms matrix, that’s why we team up with digital agencies to offer you the full package, without doubling your emails.

Want to know more? Whether it’s standalone PR or a combi service you’re exploring, drop us a note to say hi.