How can PR be turned into hard results? Business Sense's networking strategist explains.

An effective public relations strategy has long been a core part of many businesses’ marketing approach and the growth of social networks in recent years means that the power of good press can be magnified many times over by anyone, irrespective of the size of their business.

PR has always worked best when used in conjunction with other routes to market. Positive coverage in the media can help ensure people are more likely to buy from you but that message needs to be reinforced elsewhere, with a more direct call to action. You’ll be more likely to respond positively to an advertisement, for example, if you’ve read something good about that company in a newspaper or magazine first.

I have been very fortunate to be able to get a fair amount of good national media coverage for my business in the last few years. That coverage has helped to establish my credibility in my market quickly and globally.

I have, however, rarely been able to attribute new business directly to the coverage I have received. What it has done has been to reinforce my positioning and credibility and raise my profile among more potential clients. For that to work effectively, social networks have come into play.

Before the advent of social networks it was difficult to spread the word. Now, however, it is much more straightforward. Once an article appears that I want to share, I can post it onto Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. My network then shares it with other people, making the coverage far more viral.

Mike Southon is a well-known UK entrepreneur and author of the Beermat Entrepreneur series of books. Mike has a weekly column in the Entrepreneur section of the Financial Times. As well as sending out a copy of the column to his subscriber base by email each week, Mike tweets a link to the column and posts it to LinkedIn, Facebook and Ecademy. It also goes out in a newsletter to his Ecademy contacts.

“Social networks represent a highly effective and almost free way of spreading my message to very large numbers of people. Having a weekly column in a national newspaper is not enough nowadays; you must also have a regular and effective way of communicating with people online,” says Mike.

“Interestingly, both act symbiotically with each other. Having a traditional newspaper column makes me more interesting to the social networks, and the social networks drive people to my newspaper column, creating a virtuous circle of personal brand enhancement."

Good coverage in the media is great to have, but if you can leverage it effectively, it can help you drive the third party credibility and word of mouth buzz that word of mouth campaigns thrive on.

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Andy Lopata is a business owner named by the Financial Times as "one of Europe's leading business networking strategists". As an exclusive offer for Business Sense readers, he is offering his acclaimed book, Recommended: How to Sell Through Networking & Referrals published in July 2011 by Financial Times Prentice Hall, for a special price of just £12.25.