Press releases

Last week, we reported on results from a PRNewswire/Crowd Factory study that found Twitter drives more traffic to press releases than Facebook. So how do you make your press release more Twitter friendly?

-“It starts with the headline,” says Sarah Skerik, PRNewswire’s VP of social media. “The press releases that got the most shares and views were those that had headlines that were in the range of 120 characters, which makes them the perfect tweetable link.”

The number of characters is important for retweeting.

“You need to leave retweet space to remove any barriers for audiences,” said Tom Becktold, SVP of marketing at Business Wire. “A lot of people want to add a little comment so leave 20 or 30 characters.”

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Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.

Are you looking for a free site to send out your press releases? British tech PR agency Vitis has just released the first of several studies evaluating the free services, and found that just a sliver of them are getting your release on to Google News.

Vitis examined 60 services and only five percent of them got the job done.

The sites did better at getting releases on to Google’s search index: 49 percent did that.

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PR Newswire teamed up with digital marketing platform Crowd Factory to analyze the activity surrounding thousands of press releases over a number of months. According to the research, 48 percent of press release sharing happens on Facebook and 37 percent on Twitter. However, each share on Twitter results in 30 percent more views.

Ken Dowell, EVP at PR Newswire said in a statement, “We have known for some time that Twitter was more heavily used for news and business purposes, and the numbers confirm that Twitter takes the lead for driving traffic back to press releases.”

The study also found that multimedia components drive more traffic to a release than text only. Adding a photo increased engagement by 14 percent and adding a photo, video, and audio increased engagement by 3.5 times.

After the jump, we have the infographic that sums up the research findings.

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Are you on Team Edward? Perhaps looking for a little of that True Blood sexy-time action to spice up your Halloween festivities? Well just hold on one minute there.

Planned Parenthood has issued a press release with a few tips for handling your vampire tryst. Overall, they warn against trusting old wives tales or the words of lying, bloodsucking undeads. But also, use protection and get tested. Good advice indeed. Spread the word. Press release after the jump.

[h/t @ozsultan]

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You can’t swing a dead honey badger these days without hitting a hipster drinking one of thousands of obscure small batch IPAs.  So what’s a brewer to do to get attention for a new launch?  In the case of Stone Brewing Co., the PR team put out a press release insulting the “sheeple” who drink “fizzy yellow nonsense,” basically daring you to try their new brew.

Stone doesn’t think you have the stones to try their new Double Bastard Ale (Availability: Limited draft, 22oz and 3L bottles,  ABV: 10.5%  IBUs: CLASSIFIED).  If you think you might be one of the “Worthy craft beer cognoscenti,” belly up to the bar and bring a dictionary.  You’re going to need it to read this press release (available here, or full text after the jump).

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The results are in and 50.6 percent of respondents to our PRNewser Poll think that creative alternatives that Google and Zagat used to announce their acquisition news were “great.” We saw lots of people giving the creative “review” and haiku tweet the thumbs up and otherwise endorsing it on Twitter.

But interestingly, nearly 38 percent were simply neutral about the alterna-releases. For all the never-ending calls for the end of the press release, it looks like many people still like a well-written release that gets to the heart of the news at hand, including journalists. An overwhelming number of them said in a survey this summer that they appreciate a “targeted” release, and we offered a few tips to achieve that here.

A little creativity goes a long way to driving attention and media hits when making a big announcement. But even as people continue to rail against them and offer ways to improve them (don’t get so “excited”), press releases aren’t going anywhere just yet.

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The press release.  Nothing generates more debate and confusion in the industry and adjacent professions than the purpose of the not-so-humble press release. But what about the language within, and the use and abuse of executive and “expert” quotes to bolster such incredible stories?

Mashable’s business and marketing editor Todd Wasserman found so many releases peppered with the word “excited” he decided to Tumbl a daily stream of them–with links to PRNewswire and BusinessWire–on “Everyone’s Excited in Press Releases.”

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Google made headlines last week when it announced it was acquiring restaurant guide Zagat.

Rather than go the traditional press release route, both companies decided to have a little fun with the announcement: Zagat wrote a Zagat-style review of the news (with lots of quotation marks) and Google’s Marissa Mayer said she wrote a Twitter haiku with the news after her press release was called “boring.”

The debate over the death of the press release rages on even as the physical form and various uses of it continue to change. The New York Times says the most creative alternatives are coming from tech companies, but clever announcement-making is something that lots of companies are using in order to grab some attention in an attention-deficient world.

Click through for today’s poll, which takes a closer look at these two methods from Google and Zagat. Polls are open until Friday at noon so be sure to vote.

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We’ve noticed on our Twitter feed that a PRNewser story posted last year has had a resurgence of popularity: “Survey: 75 Percent of Journalists Find ‘Targeted’ Press Releases Useful.”

With that in mind, we thought it was time for a follow-up that takes a closer look at how to make your press releases more “targeted” and “high quality.” For many, this will be a refresher course, but it’s good to be reminded. After the jump, five tips for making your release a must-read to the writers you’re pitching.

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Companies out there can breathe a sigh of relief. LulzSec has put out a release saying it’s disbanding.

“For the past 50 days we’ve been disrupting and exposing corporations, governments, often the general population itself, and quite possibly everything in between, just because we could. All to selflessly entertain others – vanity, fame, recognition, all of these things are shadowed by our desire for that which we all love,” the release says.

The statement expresses hope that the AntiSec movement against the computer security industry will continue to swell into revolution. But, it says, “we are just people” who aren’t permanently tied to the LulzSec identity, and it’s time to go.

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