PR pros: Stop making these social media blunders

1. Facebook, check; Twitter, check; now let’s go back to hibernation. If you consider joining Twitter and Facebook and issuing daily updates and tweets a huge accomplishment, you’ve missed the boat. If you are the head of marketing/communications at your company, please ask your social media folks to create an engagement calendar. Not an editorial calendar, but an engagement calendar that includes what to tweet or Facebook (soon to be a verb) that is of value to your audience.

Do not just arrive on social networks and forget to keep yourself updated and engaged. It takes just three meaningful tweets a day—that’s what McDonald’s does and it’s enough.

2. Push content without pulling your audience. Tell me which PR/marketing professional doesn’t want to see “What did all this social media do for my brand” report? While we spend countless hours churning out great content, we don’t spend half as much time tracking outcomes. In fact some of us don’t ask ourselves the most important question, “Why am I hosting a tweet chat or a video contest on YouTube?”