How to Leverage Your Press Release Using Twitter

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The power of Twitter for businesses has grown immensely over the past few years. Newsworthy content for businesses can no longer get significant coverage from issuing a press release to traditional media sources, alone. Sharing your press release on Twitter allows your message to reach a more targeted, relevant audience, for FREE.

Sounds great, right? What’s the catch?

Twitter has a rapid moving news feed, so tweets have a tendency to get buried if they don’t stand out. Also, a single tweet is limited to 140 characters, so the likelihood of grabbing the attention of your readers is determined by how eye-catching your 140 characters, or essentially one line of copy, is to your prospective audience.

How to make sure your press release gets noticed

First, make sure your company has a solid presence on Twitter. Make sure you are satisfied with your network of followers and your brand is well established, meaning you are actively tweeting multiple times daily and interacting with your followers. If your brand isn’t as established on Twitter as you would like, blogs such as Social Media Examiner, HubSpot, and Hootsuite, are some of the leading references for businesses looking to improve social media engagement and brand recognition.

Secondly, it’s important that you’re tracking the attention your press release gets. If you have a platform that is set up to track how many clicks from Twitter to your release you’re getting, such as HubSpot, Hootsuite, Twitter Analytics, or Google Analytics, that’s great. If you do not have a tracking tool, it doesn’t mean you can’t leverage your release the same way, you just won’t receive exact data, click-rate, etc.

The tweet itself

Out of the average 400-500 words in a press release, the headline is absolutely the most important. It’s suggested to keep your headline within 100 characters, so it’ll be the bulk of your tweet. The remainder of your tweet should include hashtags.

Hashtags are the words or phrases that follow the # sign in a tweet. Hashtags are designed to track trending topics and organize subject matter. For example, if you were to type in #SuperBowl during the playoffs in Twitter’s search bar, everyone who tweeted using #SuperBowl will appear on your news feed, regardless of if you follow them. The reason this feature is good for business is, a hashtag allows your tweet the potential to reach more than just your own followers, increasing its visibility. To make sure you’re using hashtags properly, research what your partners and competitors are using on their accounts.

What to do

Use conversational language. Your followers want to know there’s a real person behind your tweet and a good test is, if it doesn’t intrigue you, it’s not going to intrigue them.

Use hashtags, but do not, I repeat, do not overuse or misuse a hashtag. Doing so will make you look amateur and using too many hashtags can water down the importance of your message.

Attaching an image to your tweet can be helpful in grabbing your audience’s attention, however don’t force it. If your logo or another applicable image does not apply, don’t use it.

What NOT to do

You will more than likely be tempted to tweet your release multiple times because of how fast it disappears on your news feed. Reminding your audience about your release is okay, as long as you reword it and tweet it at a different time, preventing your followers from thinking it is spam.

Don’t write a misleading headline in an attempt to get more clicks from your followers. They will quickly realize and you’ll leave a bad taste in their mouths.

Don’t start your tweet with a Twitter handle (i.e. “@cvshealth launches new…”). Doing so will limit your potential reach.

When it comes to any marketing or public relations messaging, a company has to choose what their business goals are, establish measurable objectives, declare who their target audience is, and choose the tactics the company plans to use in order to get their message across as efficiently and successfully as possible.

If your company does not currently have a Twitter account, or the account has little to no followers at this time, some press release distribution services will tweet your release for you, using their own Twitter account. For example, www.prnewswire.com and www.PRunderground.com are two distributions that offer a social add-on option.

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