Tag: entry-level PR job

My First 30 Days at a Raleigh PR Agency: Day 26

Margot HorganBlog, Entry-Level PR Job, Public Relations, , , , , , , , 1 Comment on My First 30 Days at a Raleigh PR Agency: Day 26

Why use an Excel spreadsheet when you could use an infographic instead? My blog earlier this week touched upon the power of using images, not words, to generate excitement and fan interaction on social media. The same idea can be applied to reports, presentations and meetings. The bottom line is this: images are easier to understand, more useful for explaining complicated data, and quite frankly, more fun to look at than a long list of numbers and words.

As PR people, we work in a creative industry and work on creative projects on a daily basis. When it comes to compiling a report of analytics, numbers, demographics and other data, why would we ditch all of our creative instincts and resort to the old standbys: Word documents and Excel spreadsheets? Yes, there is a time and a place for a neat, classic, black and white spreadsheet. But, for the remainder of the time, an infographic, word cloud or beautifully choreographed chart gets the job done just as well, and often even better.

Just this past week, I researched different infographic generators and other creative data compilers to use for a presentation, and I was amazed at the amount of easy to use websites and programs available. Don’t worry if you don’t have a background in design, because with these programs, it’s not necessary to be able to create a top of the line infographic. One of my favorite sites for infographics is Piktochart. Check out this video and see how easy it is to create your own. After all, we are creative people, so shouldn’t our work and presentations reflect what we are capable of doing?

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My First 30 Days at a Raleigh PR Agency: Day 25

Margot HorganBlog, Entry-Level PR Job, Public Relations, Social Media + Influencer Engagement, , , ,

You’ve seen me write about it before, and you’ll see me write about it again – Pinterest. I love it and can’t get enough of it. While this site has been invaluable to me in finding delicious recipes for food that I really shouldn’t eat, shopping for clothing that I never can afford and planning for a wedding that definitely does not exist, I’m obliged to acknowledge that Pinterest has many, many other uses as well – mainly the still raw potential for Pinterest for businesses.

If you read my blog last week (or if you are an avid pinner), then you too know the ever-growing power of Pinterest. Here’s a little recap:

  • It was launched 25 months ago
  • There are now 10 million people pinning
  • There are roughly four million unique visits to the site each day
  • In February, Pinterest secured 10 million unique monthly visits faster than any other social network…ever. (Yes, that means Facebook too.)

Those are impressive statistics, especially when you start thinking about how to tap into this resource to benefit your brand. With Pinterest projected to account for 40 percent of all social media driven purchases, this site is especially beneficial for online retailers. And that’s exactly why we’ve been in discussions with several of our clients recently about incorporating Pinterest into an overall communications strategy. Just today our team brainstormed ideas about how to encourage a client’s customers to use Pinterest to help them become better educated shoppers while showcasing the company’s products.

Wondering if Pinterest is a viable social media channel for your brand? Check out Dana’s recent post How Pinterest Should Influence Your Marketing Spend: 3 Tips, and let us know if you have questions, We’d be happy to help!

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My First 30 Days at a Raleigh PR Agency: Days 23 and 24

Margot HorganBlog, Entry-Level PR Job, Social Media + Influencer Engagement, , , , , , , , 1 Comment on My First 30 Days at a Raleigh PR Agency: Days 23 and 24

When managing a brand’s Facebook page, it’s an ever-constant battle to try and secure the most likes, comments, shares, clicks and overall engagement. We craft our posts with cute and witty writing and riddle the copy with calls-to-action in an attempt to win our fans’ attention. But, a new study by a social media measuring tool called Sotrender has found that calls-to-action like “watch”, “like”, “look” and “click” are not significantly helping us win the war with fan engagement. Analysts studied 111 UK Facebook pages with more than 2,800 different posts from four different industries – food and beverage, clothing, automotive and cosmetics and hygiene. Here’s what they found:

We are “desensitized” to calls-to-action words. Fans see words like “watch”, “like”, “look” and “click” so often in wall posts that they barely notice, let alone abide by them. In fact, words even like “win” barely increase engagement or buzz among fans anymore. (Only in the cosmetics and hygiene category of the analyzed pages did the analysts see the words “win”, “get” or “on sale” boost any significant fan interaction.)

Even posts with words like “win” don’t secure the most fan engagement.

It’s ok – spill your feelings. Facebook pages of food and beverage brands garner the most fan interaction when their posts refer to emotions. Words like “love”, “like”, “good”, “favorite” and “happy” earned the highest rates of user engagement, while clothing brand pages gained the most interaction from trends-related words like “fashion”, “style”, and “collection.”

Skip the link. This stuffy found that posts containing links brought fan engagement below average. Try to avoid the “www”, “http”, “.com” or “blog” words.

Photos > Words. Witty prose and insightful questions won’t cut it when it comes to engaging fans. Posts with photos garner more fan comments than posts simply asking a question. Follow the example of clothing store Topshop. In this study, only the brand’s 25th most popular post even contained words.

A picture is worth a thousand words…or at least worth 57 percent more likes and seven times more comments!

Any of this information come as a shock to you? We’d love to hear your feedback on how to secure the most fan interaction!

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My First 30 Days at a Raleigh PR Agency: Day 22

Margot HorganBlog, Entry-Level PR Job, Marketing, Owning a Business, , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment on My First 30 Days at a Raleigh PR Agency: Day 22

If you are a start-up or own a small business, search engine optimization is essential in order to be found by potential consumers searching for your product or business on  Google, Yahoo!  or other search engines. Making sure to use key words and phrases to ensure higher SEO is a good start, but Maile Ohye, developer program tech lead at Google, has shared some more tips and tricks for startups to really optimize their SEO.

Here is her advice (in less than 10 minutes) on how startups can master their SEO:

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My First 30 Days at a Raleigh PR Agency: Day 21

Margot HorganBlog, Entry-Level PR Job, Social Media + Influencer Engagement, , , , , , ,

It is as simple as this: “Storify helps its users tell stories by curating social media.” I just stumbled across the social media tool Storify, and at first, the concept didn’t seem too helpful. But, now the different possibilities for Storify seem pretty interesting. Here is an abridged version of how Storify explains its (free!) service:

Use Storify to introduce social stories.

  • Storify lets you curate social networks to build social stories, bringing together media scattered across the Web into a coherent narrative, creating a new media format that is interactive, dynamic and social.

Or, use Storify to create your own story.

  • Search for social media elements — In the Storify editor, you can search social media networks to find media elements about the topic you want to Storify. Look through Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Instagram and more to gather material for your stories.
  • Curate the elements — Drag and drop status updates, photos or videos to bring together the social media elements that will best illustrate your story. Your story is always editable, so you can pull in the latest from the social web.
  • Write your own narrative — A Storify story is more than just a collection of elements from social media. You can write a headline, introduction and insert text anywhere inside your story. You can add headers, hyperlinks and styled text. Build a narrative and give context to your readers.

One of the best opportunities for Storify is the ease for a story to go viral. More than just about pulling information from different social networks, Storify helps you create a story in one central place while including, quoting and linking all of the people involved, making each individual person part of something larger. Further more, these stories are easy to share and can be embedded anywhere on the web.

Check out this example of a Storify CBC News created about a Coca-Cola Hug Me vending machine. Getting a better feel for Storify now? Once you start to see the different ways to use Storify, it’s impossible to not start brainstorming different ways to use this tool for clients. CBC News did a great Storify on the Hug Me vending machine, but Storify can be just as useful for brands. Introducing a new product? Making a big announcement? Want to involve your fans and followers in a trending topic? This is the tool you need.

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