In the world of PR, it is important for practitioners to keep on top of social media – but with the sheer amount of different websites out there, it can seem a rather overwhelming task. The Quest PR agency have been looking into a study by Edinburgh Napier University which has shown that people and companies with a high number of social media contacts feel overwhelmed to keep them all up to date and informed. A task that does seem rather daunting at first.

Whilst it is extremely important to be active in as many areas of social media as possible, if you do not manage all these different areas effectively it becomes a huge task and ends up giving you bad PR because you simply cannot keep up to date with everyone! Not only does this cause negative PR, but exhaustion and frustration for the PR practitioner involved as it starts a vicious circle where clients and fans are not kept interested, and so don’t pass on the brand to their friends. In terms of social media, this is a vital mistake – as the best way to get your online profile talked about and popular is by people sharing it with their online friends…

If you want to have a balanced, and easily manageable social media brand, the best way to do so is to use multi-platform clients such as Tweetdeck and Hootsuite. By using these, practitioners of PR can manage all their connections across social media and this makes the whole world of PR 2.0 far more accessible and far less overwhelming. By joining up all of a brands social media outlets into a few, easy updates it helps to create a consistent and coherent approach which will hopefully lead to a positive PR outcome. Whilst doing this though, it is important to tie these social media based PR campaigns with your business strategy.

Quest sum this up in three questions which you should ask yourself to stop getting overwhelmed:

  • Are my social media activities linked to my business plan?
  • Am I maximising my content across my PR, marketing and social media platforms?
  • Am I measuring my return on engagement?
Overall I think it is very important to not get overwhelmed by social media. Although it is very easy to get bogged down underneath all the different sites and techniques that can be used, it is clearly possible to consolidate all the difficult parts of social media into easy, more manageable chunks. By doing this, it allows people to not get overwhelmed by social media and instead allows for positive PR to come out of it, rather than negative PR.