The media landscape is shifting faster than ever, and social media has now overtaken traditional channels as the main way people consume news. During Cision’s Deep Dive Episode 2: Rethinking PR in a social-first world, insight specialists, Nadin Vernon and Barnaby Barron, explored how this shift is reshaping audience behaviour, platform dynamics and the role of PR.
One of the clearest changes today is who uses social media and how. Compared with 2019, today’s social audience is older, more male-skewed and far more reliant on social feeds to discover news, with only a small minority now visiting news websites directly.
This means PR content must be built to land where its online audiences are and bringing it to life for social and audio and visual multi-channel content is even more important. Across platforms – TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, which dominate daily life, Cision looked at which channels captured certain sentiments.
The research showed that audiences view certain platforms as more joyful or positive, meaning that where a piece of content appears will influence how audiences interpret it.
At the same time, journalists are using social differently and many remain highly active on X and LinkedIn, even though audiences increasingly spend their time on TikTok and YouTube. This creates parallel ecosystems – one where media professionals find stories, and another where the public engages with them.
The lines between PR and social continue to blur, and the alignment of these specialisms is vital to ensure brand reputation remains streamlined and authentic. Reputation is now shaped through a mix of traditional coverage, social listening, influencer engagement and paid amplification, and all of these channels need to work together. Even the boundaries between owned, earned and paid are less clear than before, especially with influencers who may sit somewhere in between.
Rather than dividing budgets by discipline, Cision encourages brands to think in terms of outcomes and the role each channel plays in strategies. Measuring success requires looking at the combined impact of editorial, social conversation and content performance, rather than attributing results to a single post or article.
Overall, the shift towards a social-first world demands a more integrated, channel-aware approach to PR. Content must be tailored to the emotional context of each platform, aligned with brand reputation and designed to travel across multiple formats. The brands that succeed will be those that connect traditional credibility with the immediacy, creativity and influence of social media – meeting audiences wherever they choose to engage.
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