Abstract Social media has enhanced integration between marketing and public relations. As such, public relations professionals have had to adapt and grow their knowledge and skillsets to stay relevant and current throughout the evolution of the digital landscape (Gesualdi, 2019). One of the growing areas of focus for public relations professionals has been customer service skills online. This specialization, often referred to as social care or social customer service, has been promoted and discussed heavily in industry circles and publications, but not in academic research. This study focuses on the survey results from 396 employers exploring the social media skills they most prefer university graduates to possess when entering the workforce. The results indicate that public relations and customer service are the social media skills most sought after by employers of university graduates ahead of proficiency in areas such as social media content production, strategy development and analytics. The potential implications of these findings to the public relations profession are examined and future research is also discussed.

中文翻译：

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公共关系和客户服务：雇主对社交媒体熟练程度的看法

摘要 社交媒体增强了营销与公共关系之间的整合。因此，公共关系专业人员必须适应和发展他们的知识和技能，以在整个数字环境的演变过程中保持相关性和最新性（Gesualdi，2019 年）。公共关系专业人员日益关注的领域之一是在线客户服务技能。这种专业化，通常被称为社会关怀或社会客户服务，在工业界和出版物中得到了大力推广和讨论，但在学术研究中却没有。本研究重点关注 396 位雇主的调查结果，探讨他们最希望大学毕业生在进入职场时具备的社交媒体技能。结果表明，在社交媒体内容制作、战略制定和分析等领域的熟练程度之前，公共关系和客户服务是大学毕业生雇主最追捧的社交媒体技能。研究了这些发现对公共关系行业的潜在影响，并讨论了未来的研究。