PR Daily is one of two daily public relations and communications news sites owned by Ragan Communications. The website operates as a daily feed of articles discussing the latest news, trends, and data in the public relations field. This informative site is read by more than 600,000 industry-savvy individuals monthly. With a plethora of awards programs, a handful of industry conferences, a daily newsletter, and a leadership network. PR Daily offers information and resources for all of your industry needs.
I have conducted a social media audit on PR Daily’s active accounts to better understand their approach in regard to audience engagement and digital marketing. I have recorded their activities on Facebook and Twitter from September 2nd, 2022 to September 16th, 2022. Below is a breakdown of those two weeks for each respective platform:
Twitter Audit Report:
- URL: https://twitter.com/PRDaily
- Number of Profile Followers:
- Social media handle: @PRDaily
- Number of posts posted in the last two weeks: 61 posts in the last two weeks
- Key Performance Indicators:
- Total likes: 111
- Total comments: 5
- Total shares in the last two weeks: 44
Top Three Posts in terms of Key Performance Indicators:
The strongest post garnered only 11 interactions out of their 116.3 thousand followers. This is the equivalent of .009458297% of their following audience.
Facebook Audit Report:
- URL: https://www.facebook.com/prdaily/
- Number of Profile Followers/Likes:
- Social media handle: @prdaily
- Number of posts posted in the last two weeks: 40 posts
- Key Performance Indicators:
- Total likes/reactions: 37
- Total comments: 2
- Total shares in the last two weeks: 5
Top Three Posts in terms of Key Performance Indicators:
I will begin this analysis by stating what I found to be immediately appealing and noticeable with both of PR Daily’s social media accounts. The branding and curation of content is formulaic, easy to identify, and easy to digest. Consistency is the name of PR Daily’s game when it comes to presentation. The timeline is a familiar, fluid stream of articles straight from PR Daily’s site, with each article post being accompanied by a small caption describing the content. To me this format is a winner.
Despite the eye-appeal, PR Daily’s posts on each platform are rarely engaging. Even with consistent posting, averaging about 4 posts per day on Twitter and 3 posts per day on Facebook, audiences don’t appear to be seeing PR Daily in their feed, or they simply don’t want to interact with it. The top post for each platform garnered a fraction of a percent of engagement in relation to their follow counts of 116,300 followers on Twitter and 108,475 followers on Facebook respectively. There appears to be no rhyme or reason for what garners more engagement, other than potentially asking the audience questions within their posts. The second most effective post on Twitter in regard to key performance indicators, for example asked the Twitter audience a direct question that prompted users to reply. The other two posts, the top performing and third best, however, are the exact same post tweeted on different days. It appears these posts are covering a topic of global endangerment which may prompt a more emotional response out of the audience, encouraging them to engage with the content.
On Facebook it appears the correlation between post and engagement is more direct, as all three of the top performing posts include some sort of tutorial, advice, or instruction, as well as an image of a person in destress (or in the case of the top performing post, a baseball). This leads me to believe that in order to achieve more engagement on social media, PR Daily needs to curate more posts that are directly addressing the concerns of the audience a la advice and tutorials, and appeal more directly to human emotion. The branding of PR Daily is consistent enough, however this branding is often highly impersonal and disengaging, with corporate lettering, formatting, and imaging weakening the connection between consumer and brand. It seems people want to engage with something they feel they can connect with, whether they are prompted or simply relate with the content being presented.
What is not accounted for here is number of times the links in these posts were clicked, as I was unable to obtain that information, which may prove these posts to be more effective than they appear. Given how low of an engagement rate these posts are receiving, I highly doubt that to be the case.
PR Daily needs to prioritize content that audiences will engage with. Posting more content such as polls and stories, and directly addressing the audience in posts may be a more than promising route to increasing social media engagement. Posting the “most engaging” content at a time of day where social media traffic is likely to be the highest may also help bump those numbers up. I would recommend staggering Twitter and Facebook posts as well, utilizing Twitter more for direct engagement with the audience, and Facebook for more emotional appeals, as the top performing posts suggest that these audiences are engaging with posts differently depending on the platform.
PR Daily’s consistency with branding and posting is respectable and admirable. I believe that their formula of curating content that has a familiar feel and recognizable layout is a phenomenal way to build a welcoming relationship with their audience. What I would suggest is changing the content that is within this layout, and cater more to the emotions and concerns of the industry-conscious consumer.
Noah Hansen Creative Solutions 
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