At The Oracle Group, we regularly attend PRCA training sessions which help to ensure a continuous high level of professional development within the team. The PRCA is the world’s largest professional Public Relations body and acts as a global advocate for excellence within the industry.  Social media and the digital media landscape has grown in prevalence exponentially within the world of PR in recent years, and social media management now comes hand in hand with traditional PR methods. It is now more important than ever that we stay at the cutting edge of the constantly evolving media landscape, so that the content we use to communicate with our audience is tailored to be as effective as possible.

Here are my take away pointers from the PRCA Instagram training webinar ‘Making Great PR Campaigns on Instagram’, held by Steve Dunne FPRCA, CEO of Digital Drums Ltd, the UKs largest PR Strategy Consultancy.

• Finding a unique niche on Instagram is one of the best ways to grow your account, as it gives followers a unique reason to engage with your page rather than any potential competitor’s
• Whilst the world of influencer marketing is booming, the market is still far from saturated, which leaves lots of room for brands to reap the rewards of influencer campaigns in 2022. These campaigns have largely dominated the fashion and beauty sectors, but brands from other sectors should be looking towards influencer campaigns as a highly effective digital marketing tool to maximise sales and generate brand awareness
• You do not need to over-do it when it comes to hashtags. These are very useful tools when it comes to finding your audience, but about seven well-chosen hashtags per post will be more effective than many hashtags of varying relevance, which often just add clutter to the feed. 90% of Instagram’s most successful accounts feature posts that include only 7 key hashtags or fewer
• Creating a sense of brand image is important on social media to differentiate your page. Using the same consistent filter over content can help to create a sense of brand image, even if this is subtle. 60% of top-performing brands on Instagram use the same filter or colour adjustments to every piece of posted content for this reason
• Always think like a consumer would when tailoring your social content. Retaining a ‘What’s in it for me?’ attitude and pushing a call to action on every post will cater to Instagram’s audience and heighten engagement and sales as a result
• Similarly, short format video content is the way to go! Consumer attention span is very limited…shorter reels are proven to be more popular due to appealing to the consumer’s desire for instant entertainment
• Consider the hard facts of your account’s data metrics, as this can give you a valuable insight into your audience, and how you can tailor your content to appeal to their habits. For example, the ‘Insights’ section of your account can let you know the best time of day for you to post to maximise engagement from your followers
• Finally, do not be afraid to have fun and be creative with what you post. Originality will bring positive results! After all, Instagram was initially designed to be a platform for sharing creative images, fun graphics and inspirational content

This PRCA webinar was a really insightful session which has given me and the team some valuable pointers to add to our social strategy for client accounts. I thoroughly enjoy these PRCA training webinars and really appreciate the opportunity to be continually developing my PR and Social Media Management skills within such a fabulous team at The Oracle Group.