5 Vital Tools for Your Digital PR Efforts

The public relations field has seen a dramatic shift from old to new technologies. The majority of PR efforts have moved from the offline world to the online world. This change has required old school PR professionals to adapt totally new strategies in order to stay in business. Here are 5 important tools in digital PR that all PR professionals must familiarize themselves with.

1. Blogging

Blogging is an incredible asset to online PR because it gives you an opportunity to build your brand and improve your search engine ranking. When you create a company blog that contains highly relevant and captivating content, you can connect with prospects, customers, and other people in your niche. Blogging helps you build authority.

When you ensure that your blog posts have plenty of links pointing to them and that they are rich with target keywords, they rank well in the search engines. As a result, influential journalists and bloggers may come across your blog posts when they are researching stories. References and links to your post will serve to further improve your ranking and reputation.

2. Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is one of the most important tools in digital PR. SEO improves the search engine ranking of content such as press releases, blog posts, news articles, images, and video, making it easier for journalists, analysts, and bloggers to find you when they search for information about your industry. The key to success in search engine optimization is optimizing your content for target keywords and phrases.

3. Social Media

In this day and age, understanding and using social media participation to your advantage is essential in digital PR. When you get involved in social media communities, you can reach your target audience and connect with influential people, allowing you to build a stronger brand. When you build a positive presence on social media sites, it accentuates the positive aspects of your brand and dispels the negative. The key to success is actually getting involved in the social media community and connecting with people on a personal level, rather than just using social media as a way to drop links and purely promote your products/services.

4. Optimizing Multimedia

A company’s message and influence can have a much further reach if it optimizes more than just standard text for search. The internet provides a full-sensory experience complete with video, audio, images, animation, podcasts, and more. By optimizing these different forms of media, you can improve search-based discovery and receive additional exposure.

5. Monitoring Brand Reputation with Social Media

By using tools like Google Alerts, Twitter, and Social Mention, digital PR professionals can monitor what is being said about their brand. Monitoring social media websites helps you collect feedback, keep up with industry news, respond to negative news immediately, and keep tabs on your competitors.

If you approach digital PR with these 5 vital tools, you’re sure to receive more press coverage than your peers, who rely solely on press releases, phone calls, and emails to get media attention. When you create and promote content on social media websites and leverage keyword optimization, you can build relationships with influential online personalities and make it easier for journalists to find you when they are searching for information about your industry online.