PR and social media look like neighbouring disciplines, which is exactly why they get bundled together, and exactly why that bundling so often fails the brands it’s meant to serve. They move at fundamentally different speeds, answer to different rhythms, and reward different instincts. Treating them as one job, with social picked up by whoever has a spare afternoon, tends to leave it as the thing that gets attention only when there’s nothing more urgent to do.

Two Disciplines, Two Clocks

PR operates on weeks and months: pitching, relationship-building, waiting for a feature to land. Social operates on hours. A platform shifts its algorithm, a format has its moment, a competitor’s post lands with an audience yours hasn’t reached yet, and the window to respond is measured in days, sometimes less. A retainer built around press cycles rarely leaves room for that kind of vigilance, because it isn’t designed to.

This isn’t a criticism of PR teams. Their skill set is different by design, not by deficiency: media relationships, narrative framing, long-lead strategy. Asking that same skill set to also monitor trends in real time, adapt content weekly, and read platform behaviour as it changes is asking one discipline to do the work of two.

Social media isn’t a smaller version of PR. It’s a different job that happens to sit next to it.

Why Bundling Under-Serves Social

When social sits inside a PR retainer, it’s usually the line item that shrinks first under pressure. That has nothing to do with how many people are on the account and everything to do with where their attention is pulled and what they’re judged on. When a good month is counted in coverage, the press opportunity with a deadline will always come before the Instagram grid that “just needs an update”, understandably, but at cost. For architecture, interiors, product and art brands, where the audience is discerning and highly visual, that cost shows up fast: feeds that feel dutiful rather than considered, posting cadence that slips, and a presence that reacts to trends months after they’ve peaked.

Social owned as its own discipline works the other way round. When it’s the only thing I’m accountable for, the week is organised around exactly the things divided attention struggles to sustain:

  • Constant monitoring of platform shifts and format trends, not occasional check-ins
  • A deliberately small client list, so there is room to sit close to a brand, move quickly and stay accurate to its voice
  • Strategic targeting: understanding not just who follows a brand, but who the work should be reaching next, from specifiers and press to future clients across London, Dubai and New York
  • The pattern recognition that comes from watching a category’s social behaviour every day, not once a quarter

Complementary, Not Competing

None of this makes PR less important, the two disciplines are genuinely complementary. A feature in the right publication builds authority that social can then extend, translate and put in front of the audiences most likely to act on it. Social, in turn, gives PR moments a second life and a longer shelf life, often reaching people the original press hit never touched. But that partnership only works when each side has its own specialist owner, its own strategy, and its own accountability, rather than one being quietly absorbed into the other’s to-do list.

For brands in architecture, interiors, product and art, where reputation is built as much through image as through ink, that separation isn’t a luxury. It’s what lets both disciplines actually do their job. It’s also why I run social as its own engagement, working alongside a brand’s PR rather than underneath it.