PressDoc Blog

PressDoc is an easy-to-use tool when the basis of your press release is already there. However, when you are starting up a press release from scratch what should it look like? In this blogpost some insider tips for writing a press release.

The outline (based on the PressDoc format)

• Title
  Describe the essence of the press release in one sentence – in such a way the reader’s attention will be grabbed immediately.
• Subtitle
  Describe the market and what the benefits may be for your customers. One sentence only.
• Social media pitch
  Explain in a maximum of 100 characters your most important  or interesting message. A good pitch is the key to gain traffic to your press release!
• Summary
  Give a summary of your announcement and the benefits. Assume the reader will not read any further. Make this paragraph worthwhile.

1. Do some research. Create a list of blogs and journalists who could be interested in your press release. Find out if they’re writing about similar products, services, events or whatever your press release is about. Note that in order to do this you will have to invest time.
2. Place yourself in your audience’s shoes. Stick with their mindset to find out what is interesting for them. Ask yourself: how would you like to be pitched to?
3. What is necessary? It is best to leave the side issues out of your pitch. A good pitch tells briefly what the press release is about.
4. Imagine your social media pitch as your first impression. Think again: you can only make your first impression once. Make sure that it’s a good impression.
5. Writing a good social media pitch is as important as writing a winning title for your press release. Your headline should tell it all, so does your social media pitch.
6. Meet expectations. Let your social media pitch be relevant to your press release.
7. Be authentic.  You are representing your press release but you are also representing yourself. Keep it personal, friendly and yet professional.

How do you write your social media pitch? Care to share your tips? Feel welcome to share them with us!

In this blogpost we have a few more PressDocs for you that gained more traction than others. The people behind the press releases are going to share their tips and tricks with you on how to share your press release online.

Umbrellian Foundation

Marc Fleskens of Umbrellian Foundation:

My best advice to share an online press release is to search for people in your network who have a wide range of people in their own network (many followers / friends on Twitter and Facebook, many groups on LinkedIn, etc.). Then you approach that person directly with a request to help you spread the link to their own followers, preferably with a personal intro message. This way you make the best use of the people in your network and increase the involvement of the second and third line followers.

In order to send out your PressDoc…

There are a couple of things we all probably know by now. In order to send out a press release you need an audience to receive your message. Make sure you trigger your target group. Come up with a strong headline and write interesting news for your audience. In this case they are also active on Facebook, so you will need to use Facebook’s features to trigger them.

First of all, start using a fanpage

• It’s against Facebook’s rules to use your personal account for your company or brand. You don’t want to run the risk of losing your whole profile (including your content and fans!). You can find more about this in ‘How to build your audiences using Facebook’.
• I assume you want to be found on Google. Keep in mind: the content of your fanpage is indexed by Google unlike the content on your personal account.
• Fan pages allow you to keep an eye on the statistics and the increase of fans. You need overview so again: go fanpage!

You’ve just finished your PressDoc and now it is time to share it with the world. But how do you make your press release interesting for your Twitter followers? How can you make yourself noticeable? A lot of PressDoc users know that PressDoc automatically tweets your press release (at @PressDocfeed). But how can you do this effectively?

The POST model (Li and Bernoff, 2007) can be used to look at this. The POST model uses a four-step approach for social strategy.

• P stands for people. Before you send out a message you need to know who your target groups are, what their behavior is and what is relevant to them.
• O stands for Objective. You need to pick objectives that fit with the target groups.
• S stands for Strategy. Strategy here means figuring out the steps that you have to take to achieve the objectives.
• T stands for Technology. After deciding the right target groups, objectives and strategy you have to choose the right technology (for example social media).

For each public relations message a company has to decide for which target group it is relevant, what the objective is, how it will change the opinion of the target group and which technology has to be used to reach the target group.

The next part of this article describes how Twitter can be used effectively to send out press releases with PressDoc.

Next to PR professionals, PressDoc customers are telling you that a winning title for your press release is essential to getting it out there. But how do you create a winning title? Based on the AIDA model (used a lot in marketing and PR), these are your guidelines:

Attention

• If there is anyone involved in the project, product or service you are writing about that is well known: mention them!
• Write down a few powerful adverbs that are relevant to the release, but also match with your style of communication and use on of them. Don’t overkill.
• Be creative, add humor for example.
• Create controversy.