If you're in charge of your company's public relations, one form of outreach that you may have questions about are social media press releases. A social media press release isn't all that different from a traditional online release, but there are some differences you should pay attention to. With the addition of images, videos, and other multimedia formats, a social media press release is simply one that you distribute via social networks, along with the more traditional online wire services.
To give you a visual idea of all the elements that would work in a social media news release, Shift Communications put together this (updated) template below:
The Pros
Publicity and Getting into Google News
Sending out a social media press release offers a major advantage to the majority of businesses because it gets your business instant visibility and publicity. If your press release makes it into Google News, you'll be well on your way to high levels of publicity, traffic, and brand recognition.
In a case study published by PRUnderground.com, the author of a novel (Alison McLennan's Falling for Johnny), published a social media news release, which Google picked up within minutes. The release was also sent out to a variety of other social media sites, and continued to remain on Google News for weeks following the publication. Alison is currently working on her second novel using funds from the sales of her first book.
Trust and Branding
In addition to instant visibility, sending out a social media press release about a business or organization can also help to gain customer trust in your brand. Additionally, a press release can also demonstrate transparency within the company, which can increase customers' levels of comfort with your brand.
A great example of increased consumer trust in a brand following a news release is demonstrated by Yellowwedge Cheese: the company released a specially formatted social media release, with help from PRWeb, which received unprecedented interest from the media and consumers. Today, Yellowwedge Cheese has gone from a small delicatessen to one with a global reputation for good cheese and credibility.
Driving and Tracking Traffic
A major advantage to a social media news release is driving traffic to a website, as well as easily tracking that online traffic. According to a PRNewswire study, the degree of difference between multimedia press releases and those that only use plain text is striking. Across the one-month sample of content on PRNewswire.com, multimedia/social media releases were shared 3.53 times more often than text releases.
Text releases were shared, on average, .99 times per hour per release. Multimedia releases were shared, on average, 3.5 times per hour. Photos, videos, slides, etc., also provide a variety of shareable pieces of content that enable people to share more easily.
The Cons
Outreach to Certain Users May Be Lost
If you're sending out an online announcement of any kind, then you're assuming that all of your users not only have access to the Internet, but are comfortable enough using it to find, view, and potentially share your social media release. While this may certainly be true for some companies' customers, it's definitely not the case for others. According to Pew Research Internet Project, 41 percent of seniors do not use the Internet at all.
If you're a company whose primary customers are those ages 50 and above, you should absolutely seek professional help when constructing a social media press release. Your release can be designed to target the maximum amount of users, especially if distributed to the proper outlets.
Time Consuming and Technical
Writing social media press releases is both technical and time-consuming, not to mention expensive. Writing a great release includes having a firm understanding of spelling and grammatical conventions, and also knowledge about the industry, how to conduct research and gather quotes, and how to present content in a concise and informative matter. Menus That Talk, a company that has designed menus that include an auditory experience, faced these exact challenges when constructing their own press release.
While Menus That Talk did hire a pro to craft their release, and you can probably get by with using services you can find on Fiverr. I've had good luck using them to draft a template, and then filling in the details on my own after the fact. You can also use this template from Duct Tape Marketing to help speed up the process even more.
High Levels of Competition
Journalists receive social media and normal press releases by the thousands. Unless you're sending your release to contacts you already know, garnering attention for your PR is difficult, if not impossible. To ensure that your social media press release beats the competition, do some keyword analysis, and target only the most likely media outlets and journalists. Sending out a mass email to a big database of journalists will most likely end up costing you more time and effort than you may realize.
Take it from me (and the case studies above), social media news releases are here to stay, and if used properly can be a great form of additional traffic and SEO.