Social Media for PR: How To Write a Press Release

In today’s environment, successful public relations needs to incorporate social media.

Social media can enhance your public relations efforts because of the potential for word of mouth and how quickly and easily conversations can spread online.

Social media has changed how you write and send out a press release. The purpose of an online press release is to increase the visibility of your news, improve your search engine rankings and drive traffic to your website or a particular landing page. In addition, you also want to encourage online media and bloggers to pick up the story and blog about it, tweet about it, etc. in order to spread online word of mouth.

Best Practices For Social Media Press Releases:

Title: The title of your press release should be about 60 - 80 characters to ensure that the full title is displayed in search results. Think of the keywords that you want your press release to rank for and be sure to use them in your title.

Body: The body of your press release should be under 500 words. This means that your press release needs to be concise and to the point. Think about what story you need to tell and what story the media will care about. What’s the primary story? What’s the secondary story?  What It Takes to Run a Successful Contest talks about the SPHERE approach, which is also applicable for press releases.

Again, use the keywords that you want to rank for in search engines.

Links: Make sure to include a link to where you want people to go. Do you want people to go to a specific landing page? Your Facebook page? Your homepage? What’s the call to action for your press release or where can readers get more information? The link should be near the beginning of the press release because some sites will only post the first few lines of your release. We usually repeat this link near the end, too.

Sharable Content: Include content that is easily shared, like a corporate video, logo image or photos. What can bloggers use if they decide to write about your news? Make it easy for them to share your story.

Consider creating a media or press page on your website where you can direct the media for more information as well as provide content they can use. Here’s an example of a media landing page that we created for a recent contest we were running:
http://pages.foodtree.com/media-room-so-nice-a-better-organic-world-contest/.

Notice that we have included Twitter share links, a sample Facebook post and badges, logos and photos that the media could use.

Distribution: There are various online wire services that you can use. We like to use PRWeb because we seem to get the most coverage and the best search engine ranking when we use it. It costs $140 for the Standard package and $200 for the Advanced. The benefit of the Advanced package is that your press release can go out the next day, whereas with the Standard package you have to wait 2 days.

Once your press release has been sent out, don’t stop there. Promote your press release on all of your social media channels incuding your company blog, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Promote it wherever interested parties are likely to be looking for news.

Coming up in our next post: Using your press release in blogger outreach.