Extend Your Reach To Social Media When Sending Out A News Release

How do you get the most out of your news release distribution with social media reach? I recently attended an event from the Interactive Advertising Bureau Singapore, and got a chance to learn some of the new development from Twitter especially for this region after its IPO. Hosted by Ken Mandel, Managing Director of Hootsuite APAC and Shailesh Rao, VP – Asia Pacific, Latin America & Emerging Markets Twitter, they shared some great tips for marketers and PR professionals on how to better utilize social networks, and integrate them to the broader content marketing plan.

Here are a few insights that I took away from Shailesh:

• When broadcasting your messages on Twitter, consider the 4 features on the Twitter platform – public, live, conversational and distributive.

• Recognize the value of cross media but also identify and appreciate the specific nature of each platform. You should utilize what the platform is good at.

• Twitter is good for carrying conversations. The nature of media interaction between a product, a message and an audience is conversation. Conversations are humanistic. If you want a brand to be felt by an audience, it is much easier if the brand is felt to be genuine.

• Who is doing great on Twitter in the region? Shailesh praised @Singtel as they understand the specific nature of the platform and how it reaches its targeted audience.

Twitter is one of the favorite platforms for journalists, in Chinese speaking communities  Weibo platforms are popular channels for media or your audience to engage with your news and content. Furthermore, a ground-breaking study by UK digital agency Branded3 has proved that tweets do affect Google rankings,  in which it shows sending out news to Twitter or Weibo platforms with your company’s URL improves your search engine ranking. In a recent example from Kindle, it also showed that there are many more things we could or should be doing when sending out a news release with social elements attached to them. In this time and age, it is rare that we don’t consider social media as one of the channels that we should be targeting, but you cannot treat social media as a standalone channel, you have to integrate with other channels to create a better effect.

So, here are 5 tips for you to extend your reach to social media when sending out a news release.

• Optimize your headline to make it easier to share.
• Include a link in your press release, so they could tweet your news. Here is an example,  tweet it!
• Include the relevant social media account, and/or hash tag in your news release so your audience could click and follow the conversation.
• On the relevant social media account, make sure there is a matching tweet to direct readers back to your news release which contains more information.
• Tweet the targeted URL consistently to generate an outcome.

Shailesh also mentioned at the event that we always see and learn new things as communications professionals, but we also tend to go back to our desks and follow the same practice that we have always been doing. So, please try to amplify your content on social media as well as the traditional channels when sending your next news releases, and see where the new practice has taken you.

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To help our clients leverage the power of social, here at PR Newswire, we deliver our clients’ news release automatically to our industry specific channels on Twitter and major Weibo platforms in China such as Sina & Tencent. When you next send out a news release, think social and cross-media and leverage the power of social to amplify your message.

Helen Zhang is the Senior Manager, Audience Development for PR Newswire