PR & Social Media tips at Hungerford Big Business Breakfast
Leading Berkshire social media and public relations consultancy Morgan PR revealed its top five tips for making the most of tools like blogging, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and PR when its founder Nigel Morgan delivered the talk at Hungerford Big Business Breakfast this week.
A popular monthly networking event, the Hungerford Big Business Breakfast was founded by Hungerford solicitor Julie Lloyd of Lloyd Evans, Sara Culpepper from The Bear Hotel in the town, which hosts HBBB and Nigel Morgan; although this was the first time one of the trio who created HBBB has delivered the mini seminar slot at the event.
With hands thrust skyward, some questions revealed around a third of the audience had a blog – although few had updated it this year. Most were on LinkedIn, and around two thirds were using Twitter and Facebook to promote their businesses and around a third had sent press releases – although the number went down if you excluded those sending Morgan PR’s press releases!
With this established Nigel explained how
blogging was the cornerstone for creating content you could share through social media and could form the basis of press releases too. Free platforms like
WordPress and
Blogger are easy to set up. Better still is a blog integral to your own website as this is ultimately where you want to drive traffic. Blogs, ideally 300-600 words, can then be shared on the different social media channels to reach prospective clients.
On LinkedIn the audience were told to join two groups. Groups are a great way to find either like-minded professionals in your sector, or prospective clients. You do not have to be connected with members of groups to contact them. An extra group worth joining is the
Hungerford Big Business Breakfast group on LinkedIn.
For Twitter people were urged to
use the search tool on the main Twitter website to find users relevant to them to follow. Simply searching for the towns where you are based will reveal local users who it could be worth being in touch with. Remember you can follow HBBB on Twitter too - check out
@HungerfordBBB.
On Facebook the message was simple: set up a business page. This is straightforward and means that you will be able to start communicating with the 27 million Facebook users in the UK. Use the business page to share you blog, and tips about your company.
We also recommended HootSuite (affiliate link) as a great desktop tool for not only managing all your social media channels, but also scheduling updates to the different social media channels
Finally we talked about PR – good old fashioned public relations! These are simply the stories you tell your friends, colleague and indeed people you meet networking. For instance setting up a blog or a business page that will help people is a story worth submitting to the local business press.
As an aside on our table we got talking about QR codes – these are the black and white chequered squares. Each is unique and can be used as a link to a website and can be scanned by most smart phones, automatically linking to the website.
Many websites offer to create QR codes for free and this one was created via QR Stuff and links to details of our social media support packages.
Naturally Morgan PR can offer support, guidance and even implementation with any aspect of blogging and social media and we offer a
social media mentoring programme – just
contact Morgan PR or come along to the next Hungerford Big Business Breakfast.