Full Service Social Media Marketing

Guest Blog - Written By Ada Slivinski of JamPR Co.

Getting your brand or business featured in traditional media publications is one of the best ways to boost your credibility, reach your target audience and supercharge your SEO.

Whether you’re working with a PR agency or pitching media on your own, you can help maximize those efforts by implementing complementary social media strategies. Follow these steps to help your brand reach reporters and make the media hits you get work twice as hard for you!

1. Pay attention to what’s going on in the world!

With the world changing at a head-spinning pace, running social media without having an ear tuned to current events is a recipe for disaster. If something tragic happens or there’s a day of observance and you keep blindly sharing pre-scheduled content that’s enough to turn off potential customers and get people talking about you for all the wrong reasons.

Reading the news - Twitter is a great platform to get quickly up to speed - also helps you capitalize quickly on trends and create social content that will fit with trending topics and relevant conversations. Riding that current events wave also increases the chances that your brand gets picked up by the media.

2. Get on Twitter - and spend time there!

For many social media marketers and business owners, Twitter is the social media platform they pay the least attention to. Some brands don’t even have a Twitter account at all! This is a huge mistake because this is the platform journalists will often use most.

To use Twitter effectively to reach media, you want to make sure you’re following relevant media outlets as well as editors, producers, reporters, and freelancers who work there. If you have a newsworthy pitch, and a reporter’s DMs are open, send them a message there!

When they put out stories about your niche or area of expertise, like, retweet and engage with them. If you have something unique or interesting to add, reply back with a tweet of your own - sometimes that is enough to prompt a call from a reporter and get you mentioned in a story!

3. Troll the hashtags media use

When media outlets post a story on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, they will often include relevant hashtags. Pay attention to what those tags are and incorporate them where applicable into your own content.

This helps maximize the chances that what you put out there on social will be seen by the editors and reporters who can help amplify your brand through media coverage.

4. Get personal - but not annoying!

Is the editor of that magazine you’ve been dying to get into on Instagram (we bet they are!)? Give them a follow and when they post about a restaurant you love or a place you’d love to visit, engage! Building that rapport with media as people first will help them at least recognize your name when they see that pitch come in.

Definitely do not troll them with constant messages about your business though! There is no faster way to get yourself blocked.

5. Share your media features

This may seem obvious, but it’s surprising how many brands don’t do this.

When your business gets featured in the media, share it! If you scored on an interview on the nightly news, grab that clip and share it across all your social media platforms tagging the channel, reporter, and anyone else involved. Your social followers who missed the broadcast will be able to watch and you’re making your media wins work twice as hard for you.

Sharing media pieces on social can also help breed more coverage - since journalists (who are hopefully paying attention to your brand online by now) could see the piece and find their own follow-up angles to cover.

When used as part of a complementary strategy, social media and traditional media outreach amplify and support each other and will make your brand a force to be reckoned with online.

About Ada: Ada’s passion is helping businesses get noticed. She started her career in media producing a national TV talk show after earning her Bachelor of Journalism from Carleton University. She then worked as a reporter in Vancouver before entering the PR world.

To reach out to our partner Ada, visit JamPR's website, Facebook,

Instagram, or Twitter.

Or, send her an email directly - ada@jampr.co.