Month: December 2024

In the digital age, social media platforms have become an essential tool for economic development organizations (EDOs) to connect with stakeholders, attract investment and promote economic growth within their regions. With the right strategies, EDOs can build awareness, foster collaboration and share their success stories. Here are the five best social media practices EDOs should be utilizing today to maximize their impact through these channels:

1. Leverage Visual Storytelling

Economic development is a broad concept, encompassing everything from investment in infrastructure and policy advocacy to workforce training and community engagement. To convey these complex topics effectively on social media platforms, where high volumes of content are consumed at a fast pace, your EDO should use visual content such as infographics, videos and images as often as possible.

Need ideas? Highlight successful business attraction projects by the numbers, infrastructure improvements through timelapse construction videos, community initiatives through collage videos, and your team at industry events and conferences with photos. A well-crafted video tour of new real estate developments or an infographic comparing your region’s economic strengths can engage potential investors and stakeholders far more than a simple text post.

Low-cost, easy-to-use design tools like Canva are a great option for helping marketers without a design background make engaging social media visuals today.

Pro Tip: Ensure your visuals are high quality and aligned with your brand’s messaging and style.

2. Engage with Local Communities

Social media isn’t just about broadcasting information; it’s also about fostering dialogues. EDOs should actively engage with local community partners, businesses and area residents. Respond to comments, share local news, celebrate milestones that matter within your region, and tag stakeholders and partner businesses. By doing this, you can create a sense of belonging and show that the organization cares about its people and the economic impact delivered by players at all scales.

Pro Tip: Run polls, host Q&A sessions or LinkedIn Live sessions and create community-driven content, like a “business of the week” spotlight to get account followers involved and help them feel heard. Prospects will be impressed at how involved you are with your partners!

3. Be a Resource for Investment and Business Opportunities

Social media offers an excellent platform for promoting new investment opportunities, tax incentives, grants, and other resources available to businesses and entrepreneurs. Position your organization’s accounts as a resource by regularly posting about new opportunities and using relevant hashtags such as #EconomicDevelopment, #InvestLocal, and #BusinessGrowth. You can also get specific with a location-centric hashtag that you use consistently across posts and channels.

Highlighting case studies and success stories can showcase the advantages of doing business in your region and also help current businesses understand the economic value of utilizing local programs and incentives. Real, human stories should be utilized often on these platforms.

Pro Tip: In addition to a location-centric hashtag, create a dedicated one for investment opportunities to track engagement and build community around those posts.

4. Focus on Thought Leadership and Industry Expertise

Establish your organization as a leader in economic development by sharing insightful articles, research reports and economic trends for your region or for the nation overall. By doing this, you can become a trusted source of information for those looking to understand local market dynamics, workforce trends, or economic forecasts. LinkedIn is an excellent platform for publishing thought leadership content, as it attracts professionals who can benefit from your insights and enhance perceptions about your EDO. Your EDO leader can also position themself as a credible source of information through consistent content sharing on their personal pages. When this is done, EDOs should re-share their content as a way to help grow their individual social media following as well.

Pro Tip: Share articles or participate in trending industry conversations on social platforms to keep your audience informed about both local and national economic trends.

5. Monitor and Measure Your Impact

Social media is a powerful tool, but only if you track and measure your efforts. Analytics tools on all social media platforms have improved a great deal in recent years, and online training courses can help any marketer learn how to understand these analytics. These tools can be used to monitor engagement rates, audience growth and post performance. Understanding which types of content resonate most with your audience will help refine your social media marketing strategy over time. If your posts about infrastructure development are getting more engagement, consider focusing more on these areas.

Pro Tip: You can find metrics within the individual social platforms you are using, but additional tools like Google Analytics, Hootsuite, or Sprout Social can also be integrated with your accounts to help you gain insights into your audience and adjust your content strategy with the help of deeper insight.

Conclusion

Social media platforms are becoming an increasingly vital tool for economic development organizations looking to create and expand connections, drive business investment for their region, and grow their credibility as a thought leader in their market’s economy. By focusing on visual storytelling, engaging with local partners, providing valuable resources, sharing thought leadership, and measuring success, EDOs can effectively harness the power of social media to foster growth and prosperity in their regions.

Within the field of public relations, media relations is one of the key tactical areas needed to achieve success in influencing perceptions. To execute well on media relations, though, it requires a finesse well beyond other rote tasks within the field. Most certainly, like managing many different other relationships in our lives as well, establishing and maintaining strong media relationships is an essential step in ensuring your message is heard by a wider audience. Journalists are inundated with countless story pitches, and standing out requires more than just sending a note with a press release. It’s about creating real, lasting connections that benefit both you and the journalists you work with. Strong media relationships not only help secure coverage but also build trust, credibility, and mutual respect. Here’s how to nurture and maintain those relationships.

Understand and Respect Deadlines

Timing is essential when working with journalists. Being aware of deadlines and sending pitches at the right hours of the day and days of the week, and with the freshest of news shows that you understand how fast paced a journalist’s work can be. News priorities can shift quickly, so keep in mind that deadlines may change as journalists focus on breaking stories or urgent news. Reaching out during especially busy times, like election cycles or just before a print deadline, can cause your pitch to be missed and may convey a lack of awareness of their workflow. When possible, provide background or framing information through links to give journalists more context, and provide visual assets to convey the visual aspect of the story as well. This shows you respect their workload and efficiency. and gives them flexibility to manage changing demands.

Personalize Your Pitches

Journalists receive countless proactive story pitches daily, so a one-size-fits-all approach can end up in the junk folder, or even worse, with a full email account block. Take the time to research the journalist’s beat, read their recent articles, study up on their personal background and interests, and familiarize yourself with their writing style. Reference specific stories they’ve covered that align with your pitch or spokesperson offering and emphasize why the topic is relevant to their readers or their interests. This shows you value the journalist’s expertise and helps you come across as someone who understands their audience and respects their time.

Be a Reliable, Go-To Source

Building strong media relationships comes down to being consistent and reliable. While your first interaction might center around a unique, proactive story idea, the real opportunity to garner ongoing coverage will come through your reactive responsiveness. By providing accurate information, following through on promises, and being communicative if there are delays or changes, you will establish yourself with the reporter as a trustworthy contact. Over time, this honest approach makes you someone they can count on, and journalists will appreciate your clear communication and dependability, and reach out to you with more and more opportunities to be included in their stories in the future.

Engage on Social Media

Social media is a great way to stay connected with journalists without bombarding them with unsuited pitches. Follow them on platforms like X and LinkedIn, like or share their posts, and feel free to reach out if something they’ve shared catches your eye—beyond just what’s relevant to your organization. This helps you stay on their radar and helps you build a genuine, friendly relationship over time.

Make Time for In-Person Meetings

Whenever you can, take the opportunity to meet your journalist contacts face-to-face. Whether it’s grabbing coffee or attending events where you know they will be present, in-person interactions allow you to build a more personal rapport and deepen your relationship. These moments stand out, helping you move beyond just another email in their inbox or a LinkedIn connection, and establishing you as a real person. The result is a stronger, more personal professional bond that will likely help you secure their attention better the next time you have a creative story you want to tell.

Authenticity is Key

To truly succeed in media relations, you’ve got to be all-in. Journalists can tell when you’re just going through the motions or only focused on your own robotica genda. Authenticity matters. When you genuinely care about their work, respect their time, and take an interest in their stories, you’ll create real connections that lead to better, more meaningful editorial coverage for your clients. At the end of the day, strong media relationships are built on mutual respect and shared value—and that’s what makes them last. If a reporter senses that you don’t understand the unbiased mandate of their work, they know that it will not be valuable for them to come back to you again in the future.

Conclusion

Building strong media relationships is essential for securing earned media placements for any organization. By understanding journalists’ needs, respecting their time, and engaging in meaningful ways, you lay a foundation of trust and credibility that benefits the likely success of earning coverage opportunities. However, it’s important to remember that it’s not just about securing coverage—it’s about cultivating long-term, mutually beneficial relationships that go beyond the proactive pitch and turn you into a valuable source for many stories to come for the years ahead in their reporting careers.

We’re Here to Help

Interested in expanding your network of media relationships for your economic development, real estate, or non-profit organization? Reach us at hello@violetpr.com.