Calling All PR experts, Facebook Wants to Connect with You & You'd be a Fool to Miss Out

In July Facebook hosted an event at its headquarters in California ensuring that this time round the audience was not the usual round of IT or engineers but a whole new breed of experts that it wanted to engage with - Public Relations (PR) professionals. The conference was packed with PR people from big brands and it that was designed to showcase Facebook's strengths as a PR platform, which it did with a series of briefings that included Randi Zuckerberg (sister of CEO Mark).

With half-a-billion users, Facebook is an established advertising platform for everything from video games to e-commerce and it wants to show its strengths as a successful PR tool for companies. PR represents a very attractive and lucrative opportunity to the Facebook conglomerate. Today, thousands of brands use Facebook Pages as a way to engage and interact with their fans and among some of the most successful company pages are Starbucks, Coca-Cola and Zynga's Texas Hold'em Poker (which currently holds the number one page on Facebook).

Facebook knows that social media is changing the way PR experts work. The power of mainstream news organisations has declined and that many PR professionals follow their audiences online; and that it can be centre stage for any social media marketing or PR campaign. Randi Zuckerberg explained how tools such as live video streaming of special events enables users to connect, share and post updates in real-time as they witness videos being streamed such as company speeches, webcasts or presentations. CNN used this feature for its online streaming coverage of the Obama Inauguration and Michael Jackson's memorial service.

Facebook has also set up a brand new page for PR professionals, called 'PR on Facebook' which provides information of how to 'like' any article online, using a Firefox plug-in, or tips on live-streaming and now has 13,106 members, but the PR wonders of Facebook doesn't stop there. It offers many other great tools to use in PR campaigns from - Sending targeted updates to followers based on specific location or language and soon there will be a feature to include gender and age targeting. Or that when Facebook ad is paired with a Facebook event invite it can serve as a powerful way to capture the attention of followers and draw them to the next event. Facebook Notes invites guests to share content; as Facebook itself invites celebrities like Arianna Huffington and others to guest blog for them using Facebook Notes. The site's analytics dashboard, Facebook Insights will help PR experts understand who is following their brand.

The potential of Facebook's PR potential is enormous, as market research published this February by Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research Technologies found that an incredible 60% of individuals who 'like' pages dedicated to brands on Facebook are more likely to recommend the brand and the study confirmed that engagement actually leads to purchases. An impressive 51% of Facebook fans indicated that they are more likely to buy since connecting online!

Photo Credit:By Topgold