In this deck, our Senior Digital PR Executive, Dan, explores how digital marketers, PR professionals and content creators can use social media to inform creative content through the latest social trends, data and emerging ideas from across a wide range of platforms, including Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit and YouTube.

1. Webinar
Using social media to inform you
and your campaigns
Social Media Ideas, Inspiration and Data

2. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
• Background: Digital marketing and Digital PR
• Client sectors: Leisure, tech and finance
• Main responsibilities: Outreach strategy, campaign
development and digital PR tactics
Dan Bermingham-Shaw
Senior Digital PR Executive
at Builtvisible
Twitter: @dbs__7

3. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Coming Up… What to expect from the next half hour.
I will be taking you through some of the places I go, along with the team, to find inspiration
online and across social media channels, as well as some great free tools that will be able to:
• add helpful social-media-based data points to your campaigns
• validate interest in topics
• spot trends in activity among online communities
• develop your knowledge and awareness of social media tools

4. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Twitter is the by far the most
popular social media channel for
journalists
For Digital PR pros, knowing where journalists
spend their time and find their news is important.
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Reddit YouTube Instagram TikTok
Which social network is most valuable to you as a journalist?
Muck Rack State of Journalism 2020

5. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
What makes a story more
shareable?
Knowing why journalists will take on a story is
equally important.
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90%
Contains an Image
Subject could be connected to a trending story
Easily localized/made relevant to your target audience
Contains a Video
Brevity
Data in the headline
Quotes from a company spokesperson
Muck Rack State of Journalism 2020

6. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Inspiration and Data
The two main points of this
webinar…
There are many paid social listening tools,
Application Programming Interfaces (API) and
ways to scrape social data, but this won’t be my
focus.
I will be sharing ways to find inspiration and
data in free and easy ways for everyone and I’ll
be covering these social platforms:
• Twitter
• TikTok
• Reddit
• Instagram
• Twitch
• YouTube
• Wikipedia
• Bonus

7. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Twitter…
Where the news breaks
• Follow news trends live in the Explore Tab
• Use #JournoRequest to communicate directly
with journalists
• Use #PRRequest to find contributors for your
own content
• Direct message influencers and experts to get
quotes
These are the bread and butter uses, but how else
can we use it?

8. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Trends can be hard to keep up
with
The news is non-stop…

9. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Apps like Trends Map and
Trends24
A look at what people are tweeting right now
across the world

10. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Twitter Lists
Keep up with Twitter and the
niche expert discussions
Twitter lists are under-utilized but a super
helpful way of keeping track of niche
discussions of topics.
It is also a great place to segment down
experts from various fields such as
“politics”, “sport”, “Digital PR”, “data” and
so on.
Rather than following thousands of
people and getting drowned in a busy
timeline, add people to lists that you can
click into and follow.

11. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Twitter Data Snacks
Search for data-lead accounts on Twitter for
inspiration and sources

12. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Twitter Data Snacks
Search for data-lead accounts on
Twitter for inspiration and sources
Accounts like @ChartrDaily are great at taking
current news topics and presenting them in chart
format.
Their newsletter provides a roundup of their charts,
and a topical list of “data snacks.”
Utilize data accounts to inspire your own
campaigns and keep up to date with trends and
data worth visualizing.
These are much easier to keep up with using
Twitter lists.

13. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Social Blade
Such a vast, data rich and helpful
tool
This tool covers pretty much every social and is
often cited as a source from big sites.
Social Blade tracks social media statistics and
analytics for Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok
and more.
You can see all the details about every public
account on each platform.
Spot trends and spikes in the followers of each
account, their posts and their ranking vs other
accounts.

14. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Spot trends in growth among
users
Followers and other stats

15. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Social Blade
Such a vast, data rich and helpful
tool
Similarly, stats for YouTube can be found,
with even their estimated monthly and yearly
earnings being predicted…
• Follower/subscriber counts
• Engagement rates
• Video Views
• Estimated Earnings
These sort of stats could be put together in
data rankings for campaigns or even just
used as supportive figures.

16. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns

17. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Talking of TikTok…
The emerging platform that
exploded over the past few
years
1% of journalists used TikTok, and
76% say they have no plans to use it.
However, journalists are on it, and
some have done great jobs of getting
the news in front of a younger
audience.
We will likely see a lot more jumping
onto the platform in the future.
It’s also an incredible place to spot
internet trends, memes and creativity
online…
"People on this app are the people of the future,
whether you like it or not. From a business
perspective, I don't know why you would ignore that.
"It's a great creative space and a really collaborative
space perfect for a newspaper.“
Dave Jorgenson, Washington Post journalist and famous TikToker

18. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
“What happens on TikTok today will be driving global
cultural conversation tomorrow.”
Creative Review

19. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
What happens on TikTok… …doesn’t stay on TikTok

20. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Trending TikTok Tags Stay in the loop with the latest TikTok trends

21. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Searching for trends on the
platform
Discover hashtags and their view data

22. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Data on TikTok
Just a little data nugget for
you…
As with most social platforms, hashtags
are a great way to find what you are
looking for quickly, and TikTok is no
different.
For a bit of inspiration away from the
funny video memes and so on, check out
stuff like this.
Data viz videos are quite popular, and are
being used by news accounts on the
platform to convey complicated news
stories in an easily consumable way…

23. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
And it’s not just for idea
inspiration… journalists are on
TikTok too
Some are even asking users to help with their
stories…

24. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
A Google Doc of
Journalists on
TikTok
Journalists and publications
are on the platform, and you
can see them all here…
Here is a running Google Doc of all
the journalists and publications
currently on the platform…
Keep up with the news in video
format – how are journalists and
publications visualizing the news in
this way?
Look at what they are covering and
how they are covering it – take
inspiration from this and spot trends
that you can jump on.

25. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns

26. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Reddit: The front
page of the
internet
Communities and Data on
Reddit
Reddit is one of the first places I go
when I’m trying to kick off an idea.
It’s so easy to find passionate and
knowledgeable people discussing
topics that they have experience and
asking questions that you haven’t
thought of.
It’s one of the biggest websites in
the world.
So how can it be used for campaign
inspiration and data sources?

27. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
The front page with
millions of pages to
explore
Millions of subreddits, hundreds of
thousands of active communities
Harold Kalje, the VP and President of Global
Advertising recently explained how Reddit
embodies what is going on in society.
Communities grow based on trends that are
happening in society.
Explore, contribute and ask questions of
communities to gain a greater understanding of
what content people want and need.
72% say they want brands to contribute and
participate in communities.

28. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Search the site Search for whatever topics you’re interested in

29. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Choose a Subreddit Select a niche subreddit to explore

30. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Search through this Subreddit
Queries such as “how to” are a good place to
start
7 pt

31. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns

32. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Read the comments
Look through discussions and engage with the
conversation

33. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
According to Reddit… Insights from Reddit make the news.

34. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Subreddit Stats
https://subredditstats.com/ is a good place to spot
growing communities and to gather data on them

35. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns

36. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
r/datasets
A subreddit for users to request and share
datasets

37. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Data is Beautiful
A cool place for original content with sources for
their data visualisations

38. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Instagram
“Capture and share the
world's moments”
The most visual social media
platform, with a huge active user
base.
Instagram wouldn’t be my first
choice for content inspiration, but I
still spend a lot of time on the app.
There are plenty of data viz
accounts.
Data from hashtags and tagged
locations can be used for content
and is quite popular in media
coverage.

39. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
We can use Instagram hashtag and post data to create rankings in
content…

40. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns

41. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Pieces like this use hashtags as
data
These are easy to simply search and the
numbers are visible on page.

42. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
We can use Geo-Location
numbers too
These are also simple to search for, but posts
numbers don’t display on the page

43. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Search for a location on
Instagram
Such as The Colosseum

44. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Search “Instagram Posts” on the
page
Find the number of posts tagged in that location

45. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
From favourite food to regional
maps…
There are many options to make the most of in
rankings.

46. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
The 7 Insta-World Wonders… A comprehensive ranking for Icelandair
The Seven Insta Wonders

47. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Data and visual accounts
A few good accounts to follow below, but a more
comprehensive list can be found on ChartrDaily’s
‘following’ section…

48. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
YouTube
Finally… the second biggest
social channel
While Twitch reached 1.6 billion
hours of views in October,
YouTube achieves over 1 billion
views a day.
3 billion searches per month and
the #2 search engine in the
world…
It’s popularity and massive
usage makes it a perfect place
to pull trends and data from.

49. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Google Trends… but for YouTube Trends with benefits

50. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
YouTube Culture & Trends
Search through the latest trends, stories and
YouTube records
YouTube Discover Trends

51. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
YouTube Trends in the News
Collated articles featuring YouTube videos and
data

52. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Twitch
The live streaming Platform
Twitch is a livestreaming platform
focused on video games.
The pandemic has caused usage to
rise with 1.6 billion hours of video
watched in October.
Twitch itself is on an upward trend,
and should be paid attention to…
There are sites to monitor these
trends and utilize that data.

53. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Twitch Tracker twitchtracker.com

54. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Wikipedia
Not necessarily a social
platform
While it isn’t quite a social platform,
it is one of the biggest sites in the
world and one of the largest online
communities.
It’s a great indicator of trends.
If you could see the page views of
certain Wikipedia pages, it could
certainly help validate data points
and trends…

55. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Page View Analysis The data goes back to July 2015

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Cultural Trends can be
highlighted with Wikipedia data
The Queen’s Gambit was a Netflix hit – and all
about chess. The Wikipedia “chess” page saw a
monumental rise in popularity…

57. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Monthly Rankings of most
visited page
Netflix shows, celebrities and political names…

58. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
While these are the main social channels and features I use, I have
gathered a few more tips just to finish off with…

59. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Final tips
Email alerts, newsletters and other news/data
sites
• Talkwalker alerts – get hashtag uses and mentions sent straight to your inbox
to monitor activity and trends
• Exploding Topics – a weekly email newsletter to pick out and highlight the
latest trends before they take off.
• Content Curated – a monthly newsletter highlighting exceptional content,
helping to inspire and inform your future campaigns.
• YouGov Daily – a daily newsletter of top-line data with the first results from
the three topical questions they ask the country every morning.
• Feedly – create your own feeds of news with this news aggregator site to
keep up with the latest news trends.
• NewsNow – another news aggregator, full of news from sources across the
world, highlighting the most read pieces.
• Spotify – music streaming data going back to 2017

60. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
• Let me know what you thought and if you would be interested in delving into
any of these topics further?
• My colleague Kristina’s talk on using Twitter as Digital PRs is tomorrow at the
Online PR show and not one to miss – check her Twitter for more details and
sign up: @kristinaaemily
• Next up any questions? Send on to dan@builtvisible.com
Part 2?
Would you like to see more?

61. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Questions?
The end…

62. Using social media to inform you and your campaigns
Thank you.
builtvisible.com
Dan Bermingham-Shaw
Senior Digital PR & Promotion Executive
dan@builtvisible.com