Should PR professionals care about social media tools? The short answer is yes!
Public relations professionals are multitaskers, storytellers, and media gurus. Behind every successful and effective PR professional is an array of tools designed to simplify their work. When we say “PR tool,” we mean any program, technology, or app PR professionals can use to improve, accelerate, or strengthen your communications. This could involve influencer management, social media monitoring, press release distribution, analytics, media relations, and more.
Apart from creating and disseminating media pitches and press releases, a PR professional’s everyday tasks include managing a brand’s social media campaign. All these tasks can be time-consuming and stressful. 90% of in-house teams struggle to develop high-quality material to drive PR results due to an overload of work, tight deadlines, and a lack of analytics. For this reason, knowing which tool to use and how to operate it properly is essential. Using the correct tools can significantly improve your workflow and save you time.
While there are myriad options, we have listed down five essential social media tools PR professionals should know and use. Let’s take a look at them below:
Social media tools for PR professionals
Canva
A list of social media tools would be incomplete without Canva. Canva is one of the most popular applications for making social media graphics, allowing users to easily generate high-quality images utilising layouts, templates, and visual elements. Because of its easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface, it is trendy among many professionals, bloggers, and content creators. You don’t need any design knowledge to create graphics for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram with Canva. Simply select from a collection of pre-made templates and drag & drop to create a stunning image. Canva’s pre-installed filters and effects also make it simple to give your visuals a polished look. So, try Canva if you’re searching for a quick and simple way to improve the images you post on social media.
Grammarly
Even though you write excellent press releases daily and are well-versed in sentence construction, spelling, and audience-friendly terminology, having a tool like Grammarly on hand can be helpful to correct any misspellings or grammatical errors that might slip through. Grammarly is a comprehensive grammar and spellchecking tool in one. It assists users in producing error-free writing for LinkedIn, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and nearly any other online platform. Grammarly uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to scan your text for basic and sophisticated grammatical problems such as subject-verb conjugation, article usage, and modifier placement. It also goes further than standard checks by explaining things to users and supporting them in developing their writing skills.
BuzzSumo
This platform is another must-have for PR professionals. It offers social insights that keep PR professionals abreast of industry trends and help decide what kind of content to produce. Users can find out what content is being shared by others, analyse which headlines garner the most attention, and find chances for guest posts or interviews.BuzzSumo boasts an easy-to-use layout with filters enabling users to narrow their content searches. Although this platform isn’t entirely free, you can assess a topic’s performance with their free content analysis tool.
Hootsuite
With over 18 million users and around 800 Fortune 1000 organisations using this platform, Hootsuite is possibly the most prominent social media management platform, which enables you to plan and organise content, monitor your social media metrics, conduct social media advertisements, and more is a major factor in their success. Hootsuite is one the most important tools for PR professionals for several reasons, including its extensive feature set, which includes bulk scheduling social media posts, the ability to connect over 35 social media networks, and monitoring your online presence across numerous accounts and keywords.
Ahrefs AI Social Media Caption Generator
AI has altered how people use and create social media content, particularly in shortening the time it takes to develop captions. This social media caption generator is a useful platform that assists PR professionals, social media marketers, and content creators in swiftly creating fun and engaging captions for their postings. With its easy-to-use interface, users can enter keywords or hashtags relevant to their posts, and the program will generate catchy and relevant descriptions. This simplifies the content generation process, saving individuals and businesses time and effort in maintaining an active and engaging social media profile.
Using the right tools
As a PR professional, being familiar with the many social media tools readily available is crucial. By familiarising yourself with these social media tools and applications, you can better position yourself to succeed in today’s ever-changing landscape. It’s fine to experiment with multiple tools until you find the one that works best for you – in fact, that’s what we advocate!
Need someone to help manage your social media campaigns? Look no further! Reach out to us at hello(a)syncpr.co, and let us help you save time, improve your performance, and reach your target audience.