Use Current Affairs To Boost Brand Publicity

Trying to find new ways to raise awareness of your company can be difficult, even for the most exciting brand. However, one of the best tricks to boosting publicity is simply to jump on the bandwagon of the latest current affairs news story.

While the most PR-savvy businesses are likely to have created a planner of topics and events they can use as part of their media campaigns, there are some things they cannot anticipate happening that might affect what they tweet about or how they communicate with their customers – and that is what is going on in the world.

However, it would not be prudent to ignore current affairs entirely because you have not been able to plan your marketing strategy ahead of time. Indeed, while this reactive method of publicity is more difficult, impulsive and challenging than the proactive one, it can still be one of the most effective.

Take Brexit, for instance. The debate about how – and if – Britain leaves the European Union (EU) has been such a topic of interest on social media, not just among politicians but members of the public, that the hashtag #Brexit has received 228,000 Tweets in the UK alone.

This is significantly higher than any other trending hashtag, including the Conservative Party at 31,700 Tweets, and only marginally lower than US President ‘Donald Trump’ at 297,000 Tweets.

Businesses that are able to incorporate #Brexit into their media agenda will, therefore, be able to increase their visibility to all those who are looking up, or following, the hashtag on Twitter to keep up to date with the progress of Britain’s EU departure. This could increase a company’s exposure exponentially, helping raise awareness of their products and services across the world.

Of course, it is not just politics, climate change, or breaking news that steals social media interest, which is good for businesses that may struggle to align their branding with such serious stories.

For instance, the latest ‘challenges’ that seem to take over social network sites for a few days – from the ice bucket challenge to eating a whole teaspoon of cinnamon – are fun trends to capitalise on.

July’s Faceapp joke has been used in Tweets by Greenpeace, LaLiga, and seven-time motorcycle racing world champion Carl Fogarty , all trying to take advantage of the popular challenge and gain attention from those who would, otherwise, not have looked at their social profiles.

Of course, it is not just Twitter that businesses should use for their social media campaigns, as Instagram and Facebook are still incredibly important for publicity. Indeed, Facebook had 2.375 billion monthly active users in the third quarter of last year, with 1.49 billion logging on to the social media site on a daily basis.

Instagram is also incredibly popular, which is why more businesses are setting up profiles on the image-sharing site. According to Hootsuite , it has one billion monthly active users, with half of these looking at the network every day. It also revealed 71 per cent of US businesses utilise Instagram, and there are more than 25 million company profiles on the social network.

So, if there is a popular trend or current affairs topic that you could post about, make sure you use the hashtag and post a comment, picture or video on all your social profiles as soon as possible to capitalise on the interest from the public before it wanes.

For help with social media marketing for your business, get in touch with us today.