5 PR insights from PressDoc customers

Every month we’ll be picking a few PressDocs that gained more traction on social media than others. The people behind the press releases are going to share their tips and tricks with you on how to share a press release online.

Eneco

(Note: Eneco recently transfered to their own domain name which caused the loss of all previously registered retweets and likes. This is because Twitter and Facebook base those retweets and likes on URLs.)

Marcel van Dun of Eneco:

The most important part of a press release will – ofcourse – always be content. You have to have something to say. You can have a beautiful design with images and videos, but if your news isn’t relevant enough to share, there is no use.

Obviously we did have relevant news to share: consumers can get three solar panels on their rooftops for only 10 euros a month. Eneco takes care of all pre-investments. Solar panels are very popular and since the Dutch government put a stop to all grants, a lot of people are looking for different ways to purchase solar panels.

I shared our PressDoc with a small selection of media. Dutch newspaper ‘Algemeen Dagblad’ was the only traditional medium that picked up the press release. Furthermore I tweeted the release to the 1200 followers at @eneco. Amongst them are a lot of people, companies and organizations that are working on sustainability. A few of them found the item to be newsworthy enough to share with their own followers. There were also a few Eneco employees that actively shared the press release online through their private accounts.

Lastly I shared our PressDoc with bloggers and sites that focused on solar energy. It appeared on several blogs and sites, which was then again shared with others.

V2C2

Joost van Vught of V2C2:

My first tip is simple: offer something interesting and newsworthy. The original research was born out of genuine curiosity, so I had good hopes that other people in the industry would be similarly curious about the results. Other recommendations are:

1. Partner up: if you have limited ‘sharing reach’ by yourself, then try to find partners with complementary goals. The support from Masjo and DeFlexmatch helped both with the research itself and with the sharing of the results. Don’t underestimate the power of good old friends & family sharing.
2. Be to the point: make sure the title and social media pitch are concise and trigger additional interest.
3. Pyramid publication: build the background information in layers, so various viewers can dig as deep (or stay as shallow) as they like. Share the core of your valuable information in the press release itself, but keep it roughly around one page. Publish additional information on your own site (or elsewhere).
4. Timing: this involves some luck, but our press release coincided with additional research findings by another authority in the field, later that week. This sparked a second round of interest. Anticipate or be ready to react if these kinds of opportunities arise.

Lastly, it helps if your target audience is ‘social media savvy’. This is not something you can influence, but we were lucky to have a crowd that’s active on Twitter and active with various ‘social hubs’ (with many high quality followers) in the first sharing round.

Budeco

Marco Frijlink of Budeco:

We think this was a high-impact and shareable press release, because:

1. of the title. It contained the essence of the message and was short therefore very tweetable / shareable in itself.
2. the title/topic itself is popular, especially on social platforms.
3. we prepared well. Got all the extra info on our website and shared and (re)tweeted on various platforms ourselves to gain attention.

Poppunt

Chloë Rasier of Poppunt:

To me PressDoc is a very good addition to our current way of working. We used to just reach out to our press connections via email. The problem with that is that you can’t send any big attachments (images, videos, etc.) and that the layout of an email sometimes changes when it is opened by the receiver. Now I still contact my connections via email, but I put the PressDoc link at the top of my message.

Next to that we can now – through our social media – also reach the big audience. I used to be dependent of the webmaster that had to put the release on the company’s website. If this person wasn’t there that day, the release had to be postponed and it would completely lose its newsworthiness. Now I can immediately share everything through all our media channels, easy.

Askthespeaker

Christoph Müller-Girod of #askthespeaker

• active social media community
• outreach to influencers
• sticky title/abstract
• cool template
• interesting propositions
• multimedia content
• crowdsourcing and updates

A PressDoc is everything a social media manager could ask for. Our Twitter Event #askthespeaker for 2010LAB was such a great success because nobody can resist to share a PressDoc with their followers or fans. A clean design, the possibility to update content, cool feature like Twitter accounts that become a hyperlink or provide more information via rollover are pointing into the future of press releases. Thank you.

So there you have it. Some great insights from our customers! Care to share yours?