Should PR pros tweet client coverage from their personal handle?

 2nd October 2018    PR News 

Just got your client featured on a prestigious media portal? Usual next step: sharing their (and your) success across your social media handles. It helps you and your client get more ‘organic’ visibility, so why not? It’s seemingly a win-win situation. But what does this kind of sharing imply about your credibility and that of your client’s?

As PR professionals, we need to constantly be engaged in the practice of doing PR for ourselves as well. In doing so, we need to treat our own social media handles with the same careful thought that we bring to our client’s social media pages. The art of maintaining a positive public appearance requires a balance between engaging content, as well as, a careful awareness and reaction to public opinions for both ourselves and our clients.

Social media credibility for a company can be defined as the sum of the social media credibility of each of its individual internal and external stakeholders. Let’s break that down. For an intangible asset like credibility, a company’s reputation on social media has a lot to do with value brought in through every post that has been contributed by stakeholders of the company - internal and external. This value could be negative or positive.

As PR professionals, we are extended arms of our clients. It is one thing to have an article organically shared by its target audience but extending this to our personal networks, is more often than not an issue that several PR professionals grapple with - new entrants and veterans alike. Even a Elon Musk can take a tumble by tweeting a private misleading joke on something as important as privatising Telsa from his personal handle.

Our personal networks view our shares as an extension of our interests and passions. While some client coverage might actually fall in this category, it is always better to highlight the intent behind sharing client coverage, however personally invested we might be.

A recent conversation on Twitter also suggested that perhaps like influencers on Instagram, a hashtag like #ad or #promoted perhaps helps inform audiences about a partnership/bias that is behind the post. Credibility and reputation are the type that takes years of the smallest of efforts to build and a 6 character hashtag, such as #client, is one way of achieving this on social media.

Perhaps, the next time we find ourselves ecstatic over that article we placed in tomorrow’s financial daily, we can add a quick #client while sharing it on our personal handles. In this manner, we can celebrate coverage, and highlight our client’s good work too, without compromising on our credibility as individuals within our respective networks. After all, the proof in the pudding for a well-received article is in the organic sharing of it.

PRmoment India's roving reporters are two young, fiercely feminist entrants to the Indian PR industry analyse their world, paring apart layers of complex issues with their sharp perspective. Karishma Joseph is currently with The Mavericks India and Spriha Dhanuka, previously with The PRactice, is currently pursuing a masters in Digital Communication Leadership at the University of Salzburg.