Last week Social Media Examiner published the results of their fifth annual social media marketing report. This year more than 3,000 marketers took part in the study and revealed some interesting facts about their activities and use of social media for marketing purposes as well as their efforts for the future and investment plans. The report basically covers the “who, what, where, when and why” of social media marketing. And there are some truly fascinating findings this year, which I am going to show you below.

Top social media questions marketers want answered:

• 90% of marketers: What social tactics are most effective?
• 88% of marketers: What are the best ways to engage my audience with social media?
• 87% of marketers: How do I measure the return on my social media investment?

Are you addicted to Facebook? Come on, be honest! I think I might be... And I am pretty sure there are thousands, no, millions of other people out there who check their Facebook at least five times a day. Considering that Facebook has more than 1,11 billion active users where the regular member spends close to seven hours a month on the platform and that 67% of all internet users are actually on it, the reality today is quite simple: if your brand is not present on Facebook, then it might as well not exist at all. In the 21st century your company cannot afford not to be on Facebook – it’s just how our always-on, everywhere-available society now ticks.

Lately, I’ve seen plenty of articles talking about how people are getting fed up with Facebook and stop using it. One even said that “Facebook is dead among young people.” Imagine that! I can only say, Facebook is certainly not dead among us, the young people, and is not going to be anytime soon because we have grown up with Facebook, it’s our most beloved communications channel and we are not going to ditch it anytime soon. So, brands, if you are not yet on Facebook, please seriously consider creating a presence there, because we, the young people, are your future customers, employees and leaders – we expect you to be available on social media, otherwise you don’t really exist for us because we can’t find you. (Harsh, I know, but this is becoming the prevailing reality.)

If that’s not convincing you,

With the growing importance of social media and people increasingly trusting a ‘person like themselves’ rather than corporate messages, blogger relations have become crucial for PR specialists.

Just as media relations, blogger relations aims to, on behalf of companies and clients, build meaningful relationships with bloggers (by media relations – with journalists).

Such a positive dialogue with these influencers can lead to bloggers reporting PR news or events and so sharing their opinions about a brand and its products that would then have an impact on the brand’s reputation.

The challenge lies in how exactly to build that relationship. Of course, PR professionals offer bloggers free samples of products, or encourage them to participate in contests, or invite them for special events as VIP guests etc. What’s particularly difficult here is finding the right blogger for the specific campaign or event. Some PR agencies have developed large databases of blogger details around the discussed topics, be it fashion, automobile, tech etc. However, considering that new blogs are being created every day, these databases need to be updated regularly and at the end they become massive lists of data, which is time-consuming to analyse and go through to find those bloggers that fit the specific campaign requirements best.

Here’s where a brand new tool might come in great help for PR people. I came across it the other day and I thought I have to spread the word.

Over the past few years people working in PR have been overwhelmed by new tools or new ways of using the “old”, traditional tools (e.g. press releases) and have been challenged into being creative with their pitches and campaigns. A major reason for this has been social media's growing importance which provoked the emergence of e.g. the social media release and the video news release. With these new tools progressive PR professionals try to be different and innovative to stand out among the hundreds or thousands of releases that journalists receive.

However, it is not just through such online activities that PRs can be creative. You can do it offline too. In fact, because now many are focusing on the social media and online hype, they are forgetting to consider what other things they can do to get noticed, presenting a great opportunity for the few who decide to cleverly pursue such ideas. And I recently came across a great example that illustrates just that.

The Corner Shop PR, a London-based PR and marketing agency, sent the launch press release for the upcoming Charlie and the Chocolate Factory musical (directed by Oscar winning Sam Mendes) to journalists on a USB stick shaped like a Wonka branded chocolate bar.

As a discipline PR dates back to the beginning of the 20th century and is strongly linked to the growth of print, TV, radio, online. With the media always evolving PR has had to change and adapt to the power of each channel, old and new. The biggest change for PR however was the emergence of social media, which has affected the entire media landscape by putting the power of influence in the hands of normal people and has been the main reason why PR is now hardly recognisable to what it was a decade ago.

The growing importance of social media provoked a new era where ordinary people have a ‘say’ on every possible matter, anytime, anywhere. Social media has altered our lives enormously by giving everyone the opportunity to be a publisher and a communicator.

This means, the age of ‘we talk, you listen’, top-down style of company communication is now gone as social media has been the reason for the democratisation of information helping to change the way consumers form opinions and make decisions as well as enabling various stakeholders to easily and quickly engage in a two-way communication process with companies.