Amazon created buzz yesterday among the denizens of Twitter (read: important target market) when it issued 14 tweets about the new Kindle Fire HDX, earning themselves a lot of extra attention from high-influence, well-connected social media and marketing gurus.
The genius in this story isn’t in the tactic of issuing a spate of tweets. The genius is in employing tweets in a way that earns the company extra coverage for their broad-appeal product. 
tweet it!
The approach got me thinking about other opportunities these sorts of tactics offer communicators, especially with respect to visuals. Personally, I would have liked to see more visuals loaded into the tweets. A beautiful FlipBoard or Storify collection of the brand’s tweets, along with tweets about the resulting media coverage and enthusiastic response from the Twittersphere would make a compelling presentation and give the whole story more continuity, and longer legs.
Lessons for all press release writers from the Amazon Twitter release
One of the most important lessons from Amazon’s example is how a focused press release should break down into crunchy bullet points. If you can go through a release, and pull out a dozen pithy and interesting tweets as you skim it, I’d say your content is in pretty good shape. However, if you find that in your inspect of the copy that you’re hamstrung by run-on sentences or myriad topics from easily extracting a coherent series of tweets that tell the story — well, I’d say that some editing is in order. Thinking of a story as a series of tweets creates a great framework for press release writers, and builds discipline into the process.
There’s another reason why thinking of press releases in a series of tweets is a good idea – it surfaces information that appeals to niches.
Case in point: I’m not in need of scrolling music lyrics (the words of my favorite 80′s tunes play in my head and that’s almost all I listen to, I admit it) I am a frequent traveler, and I am always interested in smaller gadgets and better batteries. I’m also tech support for my mom, and I won’t kid you – I looooove the idea of a “mayday” button. Point is, while a tweet about the lyrics wouldn’t have elicited any notice from me, the others would have. This is why it’s a good idea to tweet out different nuggets from your press releases (and white papers, and blog posts and ….) rather then just firing out the headline and calling it a day.
A series of smart tweets derived from your press releases – if your target audience is on Twitter – is a great way to earn additional visibility for your company messages.
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