How To Write A Press Release For The Social Media Community?

Learning how to write a press release for the social media community is much more difficult than writing one for the general public.

The primary reason for the difficulty, is how you approach writing your press release for the social media community, not necessarily the content.

Members of a social media community require a different style of writing.  It’s not that they hate what your saying; it’s how you say it.

The average press release usually takes one of the following approaches:

• The ‘company or brand name’ announces it’s ‘new product or service’.

This boring approach uses hyperbole to shamelessly promote a company’s product or service, and is often considered spammy.

• The ‘company or brand name’ announces ‘some sort of financial news’.

This type of press release announces that a company is merging with another entity.  Unless you are announcing a merger or acquisition that directly affects the social media; this approach doesn’t add any value to the end user’s experience.

• The ‘company or brand name’ plans ‘some sort of action’.

This press release approach is reserved for announcements that companies make when they plan to do something of consequence.  For example: “ABC Construction Co. announced today their plans for building the new XYZ bridge…”

While local area users might have an interest; most social media users would prefer that it be built with less fanfare.

• The ‘company or brand name’ achieves ‘some accomplishment’.

This press release approach comes across as boasting about what the company has achieved.  Social media users are probably happy that ABC Company has sold it’s 50,000th widget, but so what!

To learn how to write a press release for the social media community, you need to know why regular press releases fail.

Here are three reasons why these type press releases fail and are not very palatable with social media.

1. They erroneously focus on the company issuing the press release.
2. The “marketing speak” that they frequently use, inherently engenders mistrust in the eyes of the social media audience.
3. They are usually written broadly with a bland presentation, without a specific audience in mind.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with promoting your company.  We all have to make a living.

But when you write a press release for the social media community, you need to be keenly aware that they don’t like blatant sales and marketing approaches.

If you present your press release as a story that has value to the readers first, and it gets picked up by a journalist; you’ve just given him an angle and made his job a whole lot easier.

In terms of exposure and SEO benefits, consider writing a well written case study which can do substantially better, instead of a press release for the social media community.

It's only fair to share....

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin

Pinterest

Digg

StumbleUpon