#wearesocialclub, Cheltenham

New Account Executive Angharad Welsh

Former newsreader and Editor Angharad Welsh is an Account Executive at Leapfrog PR in Cheltenham. Here she uses her experience of both worlds to discuss the mutual benefits of Twitter.

Find out more about Angharad at http://www.angharadwelsh.co.uk/ or check the beauty blog.

PROs and journalists have been at loggerheads for as long as the industry can remember but we may now have found some common ground. Once the playground of celebrities and their fans Twitter has become increasingly useful for just about everything – business to business, business to consumer, journalist requests, PR campaigns, customer services – and if you have a question you can guarantee someone on Twitter can answer it.

In fact things are changing so rapidly that even those who scoff at the power and influence of social media will have to embrace it relatively soon. As with a lot of things in life, people berate what they don’t understand but Twitter is very easy to use and the benefits can far out-weigh the effort it takes to get started. In order to benefit from Twitter you need to invest some time and energy into it, engaging with people on a personal level before discussing business for example can make all the difference. After using it in both my role as a broadcast journalist and now in PR I can easily see the benefits, and they are strikingly similar.

Breaking News

People will more often than not tweet something before blogging about it. In news, immediacy is a key factor for a story and nowhere is a story more immediate than when it’s breaking via eyewitness accounts on a platform like Twitter. PROs can use this to their advantage. Whilst they cannot get the same sense of urgency behind their client stories as they would with natural disasters they can gather interest from around the web. This gives consumers the opportunity to bring the story to the attention of the media.

Contacts

There are some fabulous lists on the web of journalists using Twitter – Ste Davies has a brilliant one  here. But be careful, David Stone, News Editor at Total Star told me “I don’t mind Twitter as a first point of contact but it’s difficult to answer things in 140 characters. Twitter does suit the needs of both journalists and PROs but there are good and bad examples of both on here!”

I’ve used Twitter as either a first point of contact or as a last resort when emails and messages go unanswered but it’s a fine line between being persistent and spamming journos to the point they don’t want to talk to you. On the other hand journalists shouldn’t ignore PROs on Twitter or any other form of communication – a straight ‘no’ to a story idea is better than no answer at all.

Relationships

Twitter is all about building relationships with people – and in no industry is this more important than Communications. Without good working relationships between PROs and journalists some stories might never see the light of day. Journalists also need to recognise that the power is shifting because of social media and that they can no longer see PR and marketing people as enemies.

Hashtags

These are very useful, particularly #journorequest which I follow avidly for last minute ideas for clients or opportunities for more coverage of a story already running.

The final word

 PROs and journalists might disagree a lot of the time, but don’t use Twitter to do this.