With the explosion of digital, social media and video, the public relations industry needs to stay up to date with the latest technology. The PR landscape and how to communicate is changing. For many PR practitioners, building trust and creating good and meaningful content is key.

With this comes innovation and research, as it’s important to find the best platform to relay different messages.

"Twitter is on it's way out"

Of course with PR, one of the biggest aspects changing the game at the moment is social media. Francois Vorster, chief disruptor at Integrated Marketing Solutions, gave an in-depth and insightful presentation on the different platforms that are big in South Africa at the moment, and stated how social media channels are redefining the way we consume content.

On average Facebook sees upward of 14 million SA users, with Twitter lagging dimly behind with 1.47 million. “The way Twitter is now, I don’t think it will be around in two years,” Vorster said to gasps in the audience. He may be right, with internal strife at the company, and according to him a company’s tweet has a slim chance of being seen – depending on your followers at the amount of people they follow.

Shamefully, our gold-winning Olympian, Wayde van Niekerk didn’t trend on Twitter, even after he won gold and acquired a massive sponsorship from Nike. This is one of the issues with Twitter, Vorster claims – not enough people are engaging in it or using it to tweet relevant messages.

Some of the other big platforms include Instagram and LinkedIn, which Vorster says is a great medium for professionals in the job market, but also a well-targeted media outlet. He says that content engagement on LinkedIn is expensive but it’s more targeted than the likes of Facebook, which was also a popular topic during his presentation.

Growing awareness

A lot of PR practitioners are fast becoming social media experts, as it’s not only for promotional use but also for crisis and reputation management. The topic of crisis management has been on everyone’s radar as consumer complaints can really hurt a brand, as Michael Judin of the King Committee Task Team stated that in the Facebook world, it takes a nanosecond to destroy a century’s old brand.

Judin also commented on the growing awareness of the youth and how much more socially and environmentally responsible they are - after all, we do live in an ASM (After Social Media) world.

The conference then featured a panel that discussed the growth of digital and how relevant the other mediums really are. They spoke about ways to spend a budget and also the impact traditional media can still have, such as television and radio. According to one of the panellists, these platforms are the best way to reach South Africans, as not everyone is on digital just yet.

Looking ahead, now is the time for PR practitioners to really upskill and learn different ways to reach the masses. The old way of communicating is gone and the new way is through great storytelling and knowing what your consumers want. The youth are all online and it’s no secret that we’re heading towards a digital future, as Vorster says: “There are some people under 18 who have never read a newspaper, what’s going to make them read one now?”

View the gallery here