Using Consumer Loyalty to Determine Your PR Medium

Public relations in the non-digital world can certainly be a messy and complicated affair. If your business is looking to offset bad press, respond to a story, advertise business speaker for conferences, or highlight a new promotion there are numerous strategies for properly conveying that message to the public. But regardless of the content, the [...]

Public relations in the non-digital world can certainly be a messy and complicated affair. If your business is looking to offset bad press, respond to a story, advertise business speaker for conferences, or highlight a new promotion there are numerous strategies for properly conveying that message to the public. But regardless of the content, the medium used is usually the same – a press release or a statement.

Digital PR, on the other hand, offers multiple ways for communicating a message to the consumer. You can send out an email to all subscribers. You can post your message on Facebook or Google+. And, of course, you can announce it via a post on Twitter. Of all these options, which one is the best? Which medium provides the most effective and beneficial way of signaling a piece of information to your target customer? These are questions that digital PR managers often find themselves asking.

Most managers answer these questions with a catch-all approach. When a new company promotion comes along, for example, they advertise it via email, Facebook, Twitter, and any other available social media option. They Tweet it, and then reTweet it, and then Tweet it some more. There’s nothing wrong with this technique; after all, it’s free, takes little time, and insures that your message is conveyed as thoroughly as possible.

But some PR managers find it beneficial to be more nuanced in their approach. Since the more a company posts or tweets the lower the value of each individual update, these managers don’t want to dissuade consumers by overusing a given social media outlet. Instead, they seek to develop a system where different PR needs are met with different PR media.

There are many ways to go about devising such a system, and in this article we will highlight a simple and oft-effective one: choosing your PR medium based on consumer loyalty. What exactly does this mean? For any business, there is a spectrum of potential public relations announcements. On the one end are those announcements targeted towards the company’s most loyal customers. On the other end are those intended for mass dissemination among the general public. And, in the middle, are those announcements that seek to cover current, potential, and future customers all at once.

So what social media outlet should be used for each of these? Here’s a quick rundown:

-Messages for loyal customers: Email

-Messages for loyal, peripheral, and potential customers: Twitter

-Messages for the public: Facebook

This list is based on studies showing that Twitter is a more “engaged” communication medium than Facebook, and that email subscriptions continue to outpace both of these sites in this regard. So now, by differentiating based upon loyalty levels, you can more concertedly target your PR message for the right ears. Even for those who have found success with more mass-produced PR campaigns, it’s always good to have a more nuanced approach in mind.