Social sharing is the new holy grail of advertising, writes Dan Greenberg, CEO of Sharethrough, in a recent Forbes article.
“The challenge now is to produce content – not ads – that can create connections between people. In this environment, forward-thinking advertisers are shifting budgets towards social strategies that center around creating content that’s likely to be shared.”
This is not a new idea for PR people. We have long known that good content that meets the right people’s needs – be it entertainment, humor, information – gets results.
The changes that led Greenberg to conclude that content is a better way to go than ads has also affected the practice of PR.
For 100 years we have relied on wire services, journalists and the media to get our news to the public. Now people no longer get their news and information only from the media. They go online and they search news sites. They share news with one another on social sites like Facebook and Twitter. Just this week Facebook surpassed Google and is now the number one site visited on the Internet. Facebook drives 3x more traffic to news sites than Google News. (source: Hitwise)
We need change the way we craft our news content.
News Releases
Start your release writing with keyword research. People search news sites, search engiens and social sites for the content they want.
Figure out what word or phrases in the content of the release would resonate with current trends. Find the aspects of the story that are getting good searches in web search and news search. Put links in the release to other relevant information on your website an social sites. Tech journalist Tom Foremski took PR folks to task again this week, pointing out that most releases he receives have no links in them.
One free tool that can help you with the optimization of your text, videos and images is the PRESSfeed News Optimization Toolbar
Crafting the Headline
Your headline needs to serve two purposes: Be found easily in search and grab people’s attention and be shareable.
What does this mean? One place you want your news headlines to be shared is on Twitter. That means tweets and re-tweets. A Twitter post can only be 140 characters long and the tweet must contain a link to the full release. You also need to leave space for the re-tweet which will include the Twitter handle (name) of the person being re-tweeted. Many people on Twitter use hashtags to categorize content, so you should leave space for that too.
That leaves a maximum of 100 characters for your headline.
Tip: Since Google News and Yahoo News only index around 70 characters in the headline of a release, aim for that length and you will be good to go in Twitter too.
The trick is to write a headline that has good keywords in it and really piques the interest of the reader, so they will share the content.
Take this headline:
Social Sharing–How to Get Your News Content Right in 2011 is only 57 characters long.
A shortened link URL to the post is 20 characters http://bit.ly/ePqFSA
Social Sharing is a rising search term in both web and news search volume, so I know that people are interested in this subject.
The How to get your news content right in 2011 is hopefully the part that will pique the interest, get PR people to read the post and share it with others.
When it is first tweeted it will look like this:
Social Sharing – Getting News Content Right in 2011 http://bit.ly/ePqFSA #PRTips
That is only 79 characters. There’s plenty of space left to retweet and even add a comment, if they so wish.
Good advice for PR ppl RT@sallyfalkow Social Sharing-Getting News Content Right in 2011 http://bit.ly/ePqFSA #PRTips (118 characters)
What Content to Offer Journalists
News releases will always be with us and, now that they are indexed in search, even more so. But the recipients and the audiences are changing. Releases were originally intended only for editors and journalists. Now they are being found and read by the public. Breaking news is shared in real-time and often it’s not from a traditional news organization. Hot news items get covered by practically every news outlet. Just take a look at Google News and you can see how many stories there are on one subject.
As soon as you post a release on your website, in your own newsroom or on the wire, it is no longer ‘news’. You have to create content specifically for the journalists and bloggers you work with on a regular basis. Their challenge in 2001 is to differentiate themselves and the news they cover. Find the news niche they are leaning towards and craft a part of the story that will be exclusive to them.
MultiMedia
Many news publications offer extended coverage of a story on their website that includes audio and video interviews or story clips. We learned to do VNRs when TV was the major news medium, now we have to learn to make short, shareable online videos that can easily be embedded on blogs and websites.
YouTube is now the second largest search engine. We have become very visual and we like to see how something is done. Video tells the story. How-to videos, videos that show how things work, product manuals and explanations are very popular.
Most news sites are featuring videos on their news stories and as news content is consumed on smart phones, iPads and tablets, the need for more visual material will grow. Already more than 60 percent of reporters say they are tasked with supplying multimedia with a story. It’s time for us to get smart about how we can feed this need and produce visual material that is easy to republish.
A trend to watch is the use of more than one image or video in a slide show/carousel. Speak to your IT department or agency about developing these kinds of applications and how you can provide them to reporters and bloggers with your news story.
WFSB.com recently launched a new video player
Getting your news right in 2011 means a new look at how you deliver your content to the media, what you offer them and how you can support the journalists’ need for more and more visually appealing content to supplement a story.
