How to Generate Effective Press Releases for Social Networks

Brian Solis and Deirdre Breakenridge

Lets start by reacquainting ourselves with basic principles for good, well-written news releases. These ten principles (more definitely exist) serve as the foundation for New Media releases:

Elevate the message.

Inform, dont persuade.

Write with balance.

Include traditional and New Media.

Be informative.

Provide resources and add links.

Use available Social Media channels to open up and distribute dialogue.

Listen.

Converse.

Learn.

Traditional Releases

Many reporters and bloggers use standard news releases to build their stories. Lets, as PR professionals, help them help us in the process. When expanding your news or story into a press release, its important to recognize that most of the wording templates that are used might not serve as the best foundation. But theres room for a well-written release that conveys value, benefits, and a story thats relevant to each recipient. However, this is easier said than done. Most news releases are driven by product development, which can cause an inward and narrowly focused view from life inside the company. The final release usually winds up riddled with adjectives, industry jargon, and hype, with very little value stringing everything together.

The best releases will be outward focused and reflective of the state of the market, how you fit into it, and whats in it for the potential stakeholders (customers).

We also strongly recommend eliminating the canned quotes. We all know youre excited and thrilled at whatever youre announcing. But if the quote isnt genuinely from the person saying it and bears little or no value to the implications of the news, it only takes away from the announcementits okay to leave it out.

The best advice is to make the release read like the article that you would ultimately like to see, worrying less about structure and format and more about news, the story, and the supporting facts (and media elements) that help writers build the story more effectively. With the standard news release, try to keep the announcement between 400 and 500 words.

Customer-Focused News Releases

Companies and marketers can use distribution services to complement releases written for journalists and bloggers, to reach customers directly through traditional search engines and news aggregation services such as Techmeme. Recently, BusinessWire and PRNewswire have consistently ranked in the top 100 sources for news in Techmemes Leaderboard (a news tracking service for the technology industry). This means that a significant number of influential bloggers are referencing original news releases in their posts related to news and market information.

The trick for this new breed of releases is to write them as the article you want to read. Keep it clean, clear, pseudo-impartial, and definitely focused on benefits for specific customers. Basically, you need to humanize the story.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Press Releases

Distribution of news releases via a wire service such as PRNewsire, BusinessWire, and MarketWire offers additional value in the form of SEM (search engine marketing). Integrating keywords, phrases, and embedded links optimizes their findability and rank within traditional search engines such as Google and Yahoo!. In this case, the greatest targets for SEO (search engine optimization) releases are actually customers, not journalists.

Customers use search engines to find solutions, and news releases often provide them with objective information that aids them in the decision-making process.

Many say that if youre not on the first two pages of search results, your company is losing the battle for online mindshare. SEO releases contribute to the authority of related search results, but keep in mind that other factors also contribute, such as keyword buys, keywords on your Web site, affiliate strategies, and other tools and campaigns. When drafting the release, ensure that your top keywords are included toward the front of the release, especially in the headline and subhead, as well as in the boilerplate. Choose up to three words and repeat them throughout the release, especially in the boilerplate. Search engines seem to pay more attention to the bolded words and to the repeated words in the first half of news releases.

Its also extremely helpful to use those keywords as anchor text to link back to strategic landing pages on your Web site. Make sure those pages are also keyword optimized. Its important not to overuse each word or to overlink.

Keyword density, the number of times a keyword or phrase appears compared to the total number of words in a page, is optimized between 2 percent and 8 percent, according to experts. Weve erred in the middle of that range. Without ruining the flow, include industry and product names and categories in place of generic descriptors such as the product, the solution, and the company throughout the release. We want to match our keywords to correlate with the real-world patterns of how people search. Also be sure to link rich media or multimedia so that your keywords show up in content-specific search engines, too.