“No matter how the algorithms change, no matter what the different criteria are for whether you’re going to go viral or get found, it always comes back to creating good content for human beings. We’re entering this AI kind of black hole right now where people feel really uneasy and they don’t know what’s going on, but we’re already starting to see ripples [that marketers] are prioritizing content that matters for human beings—for people, not for algorithms, and not necessarily to feed the AI machines.”—Mariah Tang
In this #ContentChat recap, Erika Heald is joined by Mariah Tang, AVP of content marketing at Stamats, to discuss how to strike a balance between content marketing and public relations on social media. They explain why human-focused content is more important than ever and how to infuse authentic storytelling across your public relations and content marketing activities.
Watch the entire conversation on YouTube and read through the highlights below.
The Evolving Role of Social Media: From Broadcast to Community Building
Business audiences and consumers alike are increasingly using social media to find new communities to join and engage in.
“Groups are getting more familiar with and more comfortable [with] connecting with different communities out there. Whether that’s journalists, mom groups—if you’re talking about pregnancy content—professional groups on LinkedIn, if you’re working on items like for Content Marketing Institute or professional agency type topics.”—Mariah Tang
“People are starting to see social media as a gathering place, as a community building place, as opposed to kind of spraying out the thoughts and wishes and ideas that you have and hoping that somebody latches on.”—Mariah Tang
Brands are succeeding on social media by providing audience-focused content, instead of blasting out company-centric messages.
“We’re seeing more and more people getting savvy about the way that they’re sharing those stories, the way that they’re sharing their insights; having it be less about ‘hey, look at me and how great I am,’ and more about what will you, the audience member, take away from this? What are you looking for? And how can we help you?”—Mariah Tang
“If you’re only talking about yourself and using it as a broadcast channel, you’re really missing out on the social aspect. And it sounds kind of silly when you say that, but it is social media; there’s an expectation that there should be engagement.”—Erika Heald
Overcoming Organizational Silos: Aligning PR, Content, and Social Media Strategies
Social media can fulfill goals across organizational teams, however, its strategy (if there is one) is often dictated by whichever team owns it.
“People have to realize that social isn’t just a tiny little silo. It really does go across the business the same way that content goes across the business. And probably part of that happens because of the siloed way that social is in the org chart in so many companies. I’ve worked in big companies where social reported into PR, and the social channels were owned by PR. And good luck getting on that calendar if you were on the content side of things.”—Erika Heald
“Some of the groups we work with have one to two-person teams. Some of them have 100 people on their teams. And across those differently sized organizations, we’ve seen 100 different setups.”—Mariah Tang
“A lot of the time we see groups reporting into social media, groups reporting into marketing, we’ve seen them report into communications. Some of them we’ve even seen go all the way up to the top where they’re reporting to a dean or a faculty member who, if they’re lucky, gets what the social media vibe is all about.”—Mariah Tang
Separate departments or groups within institutions often manage their own social media channels, which creates an inconsistent identity for the institution.
“Within healthcare and higher ed, there are usually departments and programs and levels. A lot of the time, all of them have their own social media channels, social teams, and different strategies and different perspectives on what belongs on social.”—Mariah Tang
Align teams by using integrated calendars and creating a social media strategy that reflects every team’s goals and secures their buy-in.
“I’ve been lucky enough to have content and PR reporting to me. I’ve also had social and made sure that we had good communication [and] those integrated calendars. In so many organizations I have seen such a huge disconnect. And that’s even as somebody who comes in to do content strategy and content creation and executive thought leadership, and frequently, there’s a social media person who feels unsupported and pulled in a bunch of different ways, and who has different stakeholders who have really different opinions about what the purpose is for the channel.”—Erika Heald
Storytelling and Authenticity: Leveraging Social Media for Impactful Brand Engagement
Social media is powerful for building media connections.
“The ability to connect with journalists and media professionals. You can show that you are supportive of their work by making relevant comments, by liking the pieces that they share, by picking some of the news and sharing it organically. Giving them really authentic support shows that you are in their corner, you like what they do, and you’re aware of them. So when it comes time to actually reach out and pitch your story, they have some familiarity with you. They might not know you personally, but they’ve seen your name.”—Mariah Tang
Authentic storytelling tailored to your audience’s needs is always a smart strategy for your content. We previously discussed story mapping for the B2B buyer’s journey with Carmen Hill.
“There’s this stigma that PR is about grabbing that flashy news item and shoving it out to as many eyes as you can get. We all know that that’s not how it works, but that’s kind of the perception. And so it’s an opportunity to really go back to your storytelling roots, pull those little tidbits out, connect with people in a way that helps them feel something when they read your pitch or your content out on social media.”—Mariah Tang
“It’s really turning those stories that you want to highlight into something that can benefit your audience. That’s something that content marketing has been built upon. But I think that [public relations and social media strategies] are really converging as time goes by, with overlapping goals, overlapping platforms like social media channels, and overlapping stories.”—Mariah Tang
“Whether you’re writing about a new class or a new program or a new faculty member joining, or your new CEO coming into the institution, try to drill down and ask some questions that make that individual or that service that you’re offering really relatable to your audience.”—Mariah Tang
Successful thought leadership platforms often include social media as a major, if not primary, content channel.
“A big part of that overlap comes in with the thought leadership programs, because if they’re going to work really well, thought leadership has to be that partnership between the content marketing team and the PR team. Because the PR team understands what content is really going to resonate with the editors that you’re pitching and has relationships with those editors. But then it takes the content pros who also really know how to craft that compelling story, that even though it’s coming from a brand, it has that authenticity, it has that experience, and that it feels valuable enough that you can actually get that link in the earned media.”—Erika Heald
And rich storytelling offers so many content opportunities, including visual storytelling.
“When you get personal, when you tell a story instead of just making a statement, you’re really able to do more impactful sharing of media. So with your typical new CEO type announcement, you picture a headshot, a couple paragraphs of text, and that’s about it. But when you really open it up and make it about that individual and their life and what they’re bringing, you have the opportunity to share some of those more warm, actionable, personal images or videos that go along with that.”—Mariah Tang
“When you can take something like that and have it be this compelling journey and get people involved at a human level, that is so much more impactful than being a hiring announcement.”—Erika Heald
Social Listening and Audience Research: Informing Effective Social Media Content
Social listening helps you understand your distinct audiences and their needs, which helps you develop a more focused brand voice and content strategy.
“I also use social listening as a good part of building my personas and my archetypes [and] for helping folks really understand who they’re talking to when they’re talking about their products and services. Because frequently, folks have it in their head who those people are that they are trying to sell to, but they are using their own internal lens. They’re using their own way that they talk about the product or that the brand talks about the product, and so they can really not even understand, necessarily, how other people really view their company or the primary problems.”—Erika Heald
Any social media channel can offer valuable insights. However, we do not recommend trying to be on every channel for the sake of being there.
“If you have that stone wall in your brain, like this is a platform for young people and no one else uses it, then you’re going to be missing out on a huge audience.”—Mariah Tang
“I think that happens a lot with Facebook for B2B folks, because people have the perception that Facebook is just where people are going to catch up with their family or people that they went to high school with. But the thing is, probably about five or six years ago when there were some changes with the way that LinkedIn did a lot of their groups, I saw a lot of professional groups on a whole range of topics and across industries move over to Facebook, because it was a really easy place to manage those groups. And then once there was the integration between Facebook pages and Instagram accounts, that, too, solidified that there was a lot more of that cross-pollination happening in the B2B space.”—Erika Heald
Tools like SparkToro can help identify priority social media channels for your community, and Looker Studio and Google Analytics dashboards can show organic search opportunities.
“That’s actually something SparkToro has been really good at; helping me talk to clients and give them a little bit of a challenger perspective. Because they’ll have an idea of what channels they should be on and what channels just don’t matter anymore, or they’ll hold on to certain legacy channels that used to be really important.”—Erika Heald
“We’ve really tapped into using Looker Studio dashboards to pull out organic search queries. Using tools like that, you can see what people are searching in real time on Google, and then you can use that information, those queries, those requests, to really build out substantial social media content. You can use it for just about any type of content that you want to deliver. Because if you’re capturing what people are searching on Google, you are able to get inside their minds at that point in that user journey. You can connect all of those dots from the top of the squiggly funnel all the way down to the end and make sure you’re covering your bases; whether it’s in one large, long-form content piece, or if it’s in short, little bursts, like small videos on social media walking them through a process.”—Mariah Tang
Use social media channels to solicit questions and feedback from your audience.
“A group called BeWell in New Mexico… we went through their calendar with them over the last week in our regular meeting, and said we think it would be a great idea for you to put some of these virtual sign-up and enrollment events and community education events out on Facebook. The team thought that was a fun idea, but they also felt really spread thin. So we helped them put all of these events out through the end of the year, and the reason we suggested that is because within an event on Facebook, you can then have commentary from individuals. They can ask questions, they can tag their friends. We suggested making these all public so people can share them, and we’re already starting to see traction. We’re starting to see some good discussion: What do I need to bring with me? Are we going to cover this topic or that topic? Can I get insurance? Those comments and those questions help inform the people at the event who will be expecting those questions, and they can also help inform future infographics, videos, audio recordings, webinars, all of these different things.”—Mariah Tang
Accessing the data marketers need to deliver engaging content experiences is easier than ever.
“No marketing profession has had this kind of access before. If we’re not taking five minutes here and five minutes there to learn what people are wanting from us, we’re really doing a disservice. Not just to our audiences, but to ourselves and to our companies.”—Mariah Tang
Creating a Structured Social Media Calendar: Balancing PR Needs and Content Marketing Goals
A social media calendar should outline key activities that you can prepare for, so you have bandwidth to take on ad-hoc opportunities.
“People can get really caught up with the idea of the content calendar or the social calendar being limiting. ‘I don’t want to say that on this date we’re going to share this thing.’ You gotta step away from that being a problem, because things do have a specific cadence. Open enrollment for healthcare happens at a specific time.”—Erika Heald
“There are certain things that just happen when they happen. And if you want to be able to get people excited about them and let them know what you’re doing, you do need to have some stakes in the ground around timing for things. It doesn’t mean that you have to be saying ‘I’m going to be posting a LinkedIn post at 7 a.m. on November 3 about this topic,’ but you do need to have that understanding of what’s going on in your organization in what time frame and what your objectives are in that time frame.”—Erika Heald
“The calendar says here are the things that we’re trying to get people to do. Here’s what we need them to know about. It’s not the down in the nitty gritty, because that, to me, is what you’re doing in your scheduling tool.”—Erika Heald
A calendar helps you prepare content when possible and use down periods to experiment and pursue trending topics.
“These are the five things that just will not shift, cannot shift, but then you have weeks and days and months all around that where you can be building up. You can share new things, you can insert that creativity and that flexibility, as long as you know you need to work backwards from November 1. When open enrollment starts by October 1, I have to have this done so that we can promote that by September, August, whatever it looks like so that you can be prepared.”—Mariah Tang
“With marketing, with PR, there are periods of downtime, even though sometimes it’s hard to remember that when you’re in the nitty gritty. Use that downtime to work towards those boring ‘we’ve got to do it’ type pieces that you don’t feel like you want to do. Once you get that initial barrier down of ‘okay, I did the thing,’ you can go back and look at it with fresh eyes and say: How do we make this more fun? How do we make this more user centric? Because the hard work is done. You got yourself over that hurdle, and you did the thing. Now, how do we make the thing prettier?”—Mariah Tang
“One thing that we do for a lot of our groups is just look at their editorial calendar, their event calendar, and come up with organic social media content, the text only. We can map that out for almost an entire year, and then go week by week and say, ‘does this still align with what you want to talk about this week?’ If not, we bump it to the next week, or we save it for later. But the hard text writing part is done, and then we can focus on this stunning creative or who we’re going to tag, or where we’re going to share.”—Mariah Tang
Schedule time for engagement, too!
“Brands feel like they don’t have time for engagement. You do if you put it on the calendar… let’s say every Thursday you go back, and you look at the engagement you got. You have it in the calendar that on Thursday you have half an hour of time that you’re going to do that. Or Friday afternoon, I’m going to see which of our favorite journalists are on a deadline.”—Erika Heald
The calendar is essential for breaking down large tasks and staying on track for key initiatives.
“It’s very hard to look down the pipeline of the year and say ‘oh my gosh, I have to make 100 events.’ If you break it up and say I can do five today, I can do five tomorrow, and then don’t even think about it any further until you get your big chunk done. You’ve got a chunk done. Take a little breather, do some refining, and move into the next set.”—Mariah Tang
Prioritizing Quality over Quantity: Best Practices for Successful Social Media Strategies And Aligning Teams
Create fewer posts that are targeted to your exact audience.
“We have some groups that want to post all at once, all on the same day. But like you said, that just kind of cannibalizes it. It piles on top and nobody gets seen. So when we have those types of situations, we’ll sit down and say, ‘Okay, let’s divide this into two camps, which audience has the most need, which one is the most vocal right now, let’s hold on to that and put a pin in that. And on the other side, how does that match up with your business goals and objectives right now?’”—Mariah Tang
“So if there’s some noisy PR situation that’s happening, of course we’ll need to address that, primarily because we want to work with our audiences. We want to help them get more comfortable with us. We want to see any negativity that’s rolling around out there on social because it can just travel so quickly.”—Mariah Tang
Prioritize channels based on potential value and communicated audience need.
“On the other hand, you want to prioritize. We don’t want to say ‘where does the money come from?’, but we do want to prioritize the volume of people that you can serve based on this topic or umbrella. What’s the return for you if we prioritize service A over service B? Look at it that way. That doesn’t mean the high priority gets to be the one that’s out there all the time, but they should definitely get first pick while there’s the high priority.”—Mariah Tang
A social media audit should inform your strategy. The audit helps identify organic brand accounts, too.
“It can be really challenging for teams to justify that internally, and that’s when we see ‘if you won’t help me, I’ll start my own page.’ And then it pops up and up and up and further dilutes the brand. So one of the ways that we can help with that is to do a social media audit. Community colleges, for example, sometimes have up to 100 social media channels. Every club has a channel, so we’ll go through and manually review: ‘This channel on this platform has this many followers that are this engaged. Is this worth your time? Is this worth their time?’ Yes or no. And just really go through and check those boxes at the end of the day.”—Mariah Tang
An editorial board and regular cross-team communication can streamline your social media efforts.
“One way to get some of those conversations going is by having an editorial board. When I was at Schwab, in particular, on the internal comms side, we had a meeting every quarter, and we would have a regular monthly email check-in where everyone would share what was going on. Everybody was aligned and knew what this group’s working on, etc.”—Erika Heald
Use a social media request intake form to help your team think about what is needed to drive value on social media.
“[Have] a unified intake process for social. That can be an Asana form. I do love a good intake form, because it helps people think through: Why should we be talking about this? What do we want someone to do? Who are the right people? And then as social media professionals, content professionals, we can say here’s our recommendation for where we should go with this.”—Erika Heald
Brand Social Media Tips for Success
Test new approaches and shift your strategy accordingly.
“One of the worst things that people can do is failing to be agile. From an agency perspective, if you’re working on one of those long-term, organic content type projects, you’ve got kind of a formula. You’ve got things set up. I’m going to copy and paste, copy and paste, copy and paste. [But] if you fail to test some of those—you might have made 20 iterations—you then have to go back and adjust because the tone wasn’t right, the call to action was incorrect… and you have just wasted an hour instead of preserving a few hours like you thought. [Say] here’s an iteration, tell me what you think about this. Getting the instant feedback and moving it forward, I think, works in just about every media that I’ve worked in.”—Mariah Tang
Always provide value, even if it makes you “late” to join a conversation.
“Being the first to talk about something is really important, but only if you can do that in a way that makes sense, that’s relevant, and that’s helpful. If you’re just slapping up a graphic and saying it’s lung cancer month—’look at us, we’re the first ones to talk about lung cancer’—but you’re not giving a next step, you’re not giving anything different, that’s not helpful at all. You’re just making clutter. You’re kind of making your brand look bad.”—Mariah Tang
Preserve your links that gain traction on social media.
“It is the worst ever when you have a piece of content that has been shared widely on social, gotten so much engagement, driven a ton of traffic back to your website, and then someone decides to just take it down off the website, and they don’t put in a redirect. It is absolutely maddening, because then, all of a sudden, everyone’s seeing your 404 page. That makes people very unhappy.”—Erika Heald
“I’ve seen a lot of conferences do that, and then as a speaker you want to go back and say ‘Look, I spoke at this thing!’ and your bio is down, and you have no proof that you were there.”—Mariah Tang
“This is a good reason to not put dates in your URLs. Call it the event itself. Don’t call it ‘January 2024 enrollment.’ You can update that content all the time. You can link down to archived pages, whatever that might be. You’re getting the traction continuously from that one URL, and that’s saying something for your brand credibility for the search engines out there.”—Mariah Tang
Tools and Resources for Staying Ahead of the Social Media Curve
Mariah discusses her social media tech stack below:
“SEO dashboards through Looker Studio. I know it’s not an exact tie to social media, but it definitely gives us a lot of insight into what people are searching and what they want to know. We also use a lot of the built-in tools like Meta Business Suite, no comment if you like or don’t like them.”—Mariah Tang
“Typical things like Hootsuite give you some pretty decent analytics, even if you don’t pay for the full service. And it helps you keep an eye on different streams all at once, for different clients, for different threads that you have going on across your various platforms.”—Mariah Tang
