Alan DraperHow would you characterize breaking news? I would define it in 140 characters (or less)! Yep, Twitter is PR’s tip of the spear. I once found out about an earthquake rolling my way in Los Angeles on Twitter before my building started shaking. Seems that it’s faster than Mother Nature, herself!
In today’s social media era of instant gratification, breaking news is no longer the domain of journalists and media outlets. Companies are announcing newsworthy content through their Twitter feeds to control the message before it controls them. Of course, they then follow up with press releases and other traditional PR methods.
When You Tweet, Everybody Listens.
Twitter is now part of mainstream media and a crucial player in the information announcing strategy for Fortune 500 companies to entrepreneurs, mainstream media, PR agency pros and social media companies. Websites are even playing second fiddle to the power of the Tweet.
10 Tips to Increase PR Exposure
- Synchronize breaking news on Twitter with other company news activities.
- Create a Twitter account for news and publish all newsworthy content from that platform. By channeling your Twitter news, journalists will have more chance to pick it up.
- Keep your content fresh and current.
- To stand out on the Twitter feed, upload an image with the newsworthy Tweet.
- Use trending hashtags in your tweets to optimize your news. Keep the hashtags “white hat” by using only relevant hashtags.
- Monitor the Twitter feed using a platform such as TweetDeck.
- Use Twitter to interact with the media. Favorite some of their tweets, praise them for their successful article (that has nothing to do with your company), and share them around as well.
- Monitor competitors tweets to be able to react to their breaking news that might impact your client
- Use Twitter for reputation management. Negative tweets can be addressed and often times neutralized.
- 10. Pitch journalists directly through Twitter for breaking news or story ideas
The Best Time to Tweet
Like anything in life, “timing is everything”. Twitter is no exception to get maximum leverage. Here are a couple of noteworthy tips:
- Tweeting in the afternoons get a higher click-through rate than mornings.
- Thursday to Friday get more clicks than earlier in the week.
- Weekends are the best time to tweet and get the highest CTR
In The Final Analysis
Twitter is “the” essential tool in your PR arsenal. It is growing exponentially and is a powerful strategy to help deliver the message, making news 24/7 at a rate of 400 million tweets a day. Like the old saying, “if you don’t control the message, it will control you!
How do you manage the message using Twitter? Let us know via Facebook, and Google+!
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This article was written for Business 2 Community by Alan Draper.
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While I do agree with most of the tips I think the last one, ”
Pitch journalists directly through Twitter for breaking news or story ideas” is worth a discussion. You often read and hear that the classic pitch is still preferred. That again might depend on the culture, perhaps? I’m from Germany…
Still., a good article!
It all depends on the journalist. Never pitch on Twitter unless you’re sure they want to be pitched there. Many don’t because they don’t want the world to know about what they might be writing about. Just send a tweet and ask if it’s OK to pitch there, or through a DM or a private email address.
Nice article, Janette! Twitter is a powerful tool for journalists – monitoring breaking news, pitching media, content curation and direct conversation with customers, prospects and influencers. It’s my favorite social media platform.
You might like this related article: The Impact of Social Media on Newsrooms & Journalists – http://bit.ly/13WDFU7.
Nice work! =)
While it’s true that Twitter changed how Media and PR break the news, there is still lots of work to be done on collaboration between those two groups. I took that challenge on myself and developed networking platform for PR & Media – Evoque. If anyone is interested in providing me with feedback – http://blog.evoquepr.com/index.php/2013/07/revolutionising-revolution-how-twitter-changed-media-and-how-evoque-will-take-it-further/
Thank you!
Very nice article, like the picture too! There is no doubt that Twitter is the go to place for breaking news and new business developments. It is becoming easier for people to Tweet anything they want from anywhere and any electronic device they choose. Keeping your content fresh and current is probably one of the more important points that stands out for me. You don’t want to post something that is out of date or not interesting or else your readers will turn somewhere else to get better and up to date content.
When it comes to Twitter, I’m a bit of a late bloomer and resisted as long as possible. Therefore, my question stems from minimal Twitter use: If you’re pitching media directly on Twitter, and have several contacts and/or outlets to pitch, will you have multiple, identical Tweets on your personal news feed page? And isn’t that a turn off to media? Thanks for the great article!