Back in October last year I reported the results of a research by Cision on how social media has affected the work life of journalists in the UK and why this matters to PR. As the researchers called it, this was a study on Social Journalism. Earlier this month Cision & Canterbury Christ Church University released the global findings of the same study, examining how journos around the world use social media and how it impacts their work.

Over 3,650 journalists from 11 different countries participated in the online survey.

The results have captured some interesting recent developments in how journalists and media professionals use social media for work. However, there were no major changes regarding contact between PR professionals and journalists with email, telephone and face-to-face remaining the three most common ways to communicate with each other.

As to be expected, the study found that the country was the most significant factor influencing patterns of social media use by journalists as well as their attitudes. This again, is no surprise, because cultural differences not only affect our beliefs and how we communicate with others, but also the way we do things, including our work activities.

Now that you’ve seen the survey results of my dissertation about social media’s impact on PR and read the interview I conducted with Heather Yaxley, it’s time for the next interview to go online.

Below you’ll see the responses of Shelley Fletcher-Bryant. Shelley is a Strategic PR & Marketing Consultant, Business Owner at Firegrass Communications and Co-Founder at Ladies That Tweet. She is a CIPR Accredited Practitioner and award winning PR specialist with more than 12 years' experience in marketing and public relations. Shelley has worked both in-house and agency, managing campaigns and projects on a local, regional, national and international level for clients. You can follow her on Twitter @shelleyfletcher.

Q: How do you think the emergence of social media changed PR? Is it a positive or a negative impact and why?

It is both positive and negative; it provides opportunities to reach and engage with a broader market and communicate more effectively with both your customers and the media, however, the availability of social media channels means that everyone can now be a publisher, editor and journalist.

NOTE: As of 31 January 2013 LinkedIn (unfortunately) no longer offers the Questions and Answers feature that is covered below.

Are you active on LinkedIn? Are you effectively using the platform to build your personal brand? As the biggest professional social media network, LinkedIn should not only be your static online resume, but a living, always changing professional image of your experience and knowledge.

Building a large contacts community and actively participating in group discussions can help you position yourself as an expert in your field. But did you know that you can also do so by making use of the LinkedIn Answers section?

With thousands of professionals there to give answers to questions (for free!), offer creative ideas and provide feedback, LinkedIn Answers is a very useful function.

By leveraging this powerful LinkedIn feature you can offer valuable advice and answers to people’s question and so build your reputation as an industry expert.

It can also help you with a job hunt or to find customers for your products and services.

Sounds good? Here's what you have to do:

Twitter has been one of the fastest growing social media platforms and has now reached more than 140 million active users worldwide since 2006 (10 million in the UK). It’s a fantastic way of sharing information, engaging with different audiences and providing customer service.

As a business you can’t ignore the potential Twitter offers to boost brand awareness. With its 140 character limit it’s really easy to share ideas, news, information, opinions, images and videos in seconds. Good content generates interest in your products and services, and promotes interaction with your followers.

Here are 5 tips for better engagement on Twitter:

1. Tweet regularly

Sharing valuable content is the first step to growing your Twitter community. It’s your content that your followers will be interested in, so make sure what you share is helpful, fun and worthy of retweeting. Don’t limit yourself to tweeting a few times a week; tweet a few times daily.

I recently wrote about the reach changes on Facebook in the blog that I created for the PR consultancy I now work for. Because it’s an important issue for businesses I decided to share the article here as well, but I’ve added a few more details.

Have you seen a drastic decline in the reach of your Facebook posts recently? Well, don’t worry, it’s not your fault, you haven’t done anything wrong – it’s Facebook that has made some changes to the network.

A while ago I noticed a decrease in the reach for page updates. At the beginning of September other page administrators also reported that something was going wrong, however Facebook hadn’t said anything – advertisers in the States called the situation the ‘Facebook mystery of Fall 2012’.

Finally on 20 September the network announced it has made changes to its EdgeRank algorithm. The EdgeRank determines what you see in your News feed; this includes the status updates of friends, their photos as well as business pages posts.

After the change of the EdgeRank, company page updates are now for some reason seen less in the News feeds of the people who like the page and so the possibility of reaching new potential fans has also decreased. Some pages have lost 40-50% of their organic reach.

According to Facebook, the reason why they adjusted the EdgeRank was to reduce spam and make sure the News feed doesn’t turn ‘lame’, meaning people are only offered content that they are most interested in.