Quick definition
Earned media is exposure other people create for you — shares, mentions, reviews, press, user posts — unlike channels you own or placements you buy.
Earned media is exposure other people create for you without being paid for the placement: shares and reposts, mentions, user-generated content, reviews, press coverage, and creators talking about you on their own initiative. In the PESO model popularized by PR strategist Gini Dietrich — paid, earned, shared, owned — it is the channel you cannot buy or fully control, which is precisely why audiences tend to weight it more heavily than the channels you can.
Earned media arrives pre-trusted — a third party chose to say it — and it compounds: one customer’s post reaches their audience, whose shares reach further still, none of it billed to your media budget. It also keeps working while you sleep; a strong review or a widely shared post goes on recruiting customers long after your own posts have scrolled out of the feed.
A small brand launches a product. Its own channels — the owned half of the ledger — reach 10,000 accounts. Over the following week, 25 customers post unboxings averaging about 800 reach each: roughly 20,000 accounts of earned reach, double the owned footprint, plus a niche newsletter mention that sends 350 visitors. The brand paid for none of that distribution; it earned all of it with a product and content worth talking about.
You can’t schedule earned media, but you can systematically provoke it: make products and content worth citing, ask for reviews at the right moment, reshare tagged posts with permission, and build relationships with creators and journalists before you need them. Measure mentions, tagged UGC, referral traffic, and press pickups — and treat earned-media-value formulas that convert all this into currency with caution; methodologies vary wildly.
Where SocialKit fits
Earned media is provoked, not scheduled — but the owned content that provokes it is. SocialKit’s calendar keeps all 11 of your networks publishing the kind of useful, quotable posts people share and cite.
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FAQ
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SocialKit posts to all 11 platforms from one calendar and tracks how every post performs, so the numbers explain themselves. Try it free for 7 days.
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