The Social Media Press Release

What is the difference between traditional press releases and social media press releases?



And how have things changed?
Here is the restaruant.org now.

Social is now embedded in it fully and wholly, and it’s one and the same with your traditional press release. Tools for sharing have made distribution of news and media much simpler than they were in the first version, back in 2006. Most important: every piece of the new social media press release must be independently shareable! Let’s look at some of the core features of the content.
(Thanks, Shift PR!)

1. Simple sharing buttons have been replaced with up-to-date, modern sharing tools, many of which can be pre-configured to share specific content, or share with specific text so that your message gets out the way you intend.

2. Headlines need to be kept less than 55 characters. Why? Because you want them to be retweeted and reshared, leaving room for people to add in your Twitter handle or other social network identifier, as well as be mobile-friendly.

3. YouTube video. YouTube is the platform of choice for three reasons. First, it’s got the largest audience that loves to share if something is share worthy. Second, the YouTube player is fully mobile-compatible on many different platforms and devices, so you can be sure that your press release will be available to journalists and content creators no matter how they see it. Third, nearly every social network recognizes YouTube URLs and allows YouTube videos to be played natively on the individual social networks.

4. Mobile-friendly shareable audio. Services like SoundCloud are recommended because they’re mobile-compatible. If you checked out our mobile-friendly press release, you know why this is important. It’s also important for the audio itself to be shareable.

5. Photo gallery set. You can likely use any photo sharing service here, but Flickr is an excellent choice for its strong defense of intellectual property and high share ability.

6. Social commenting. Integrated social discussions using common plugins like Facebook Comments, Disqus, Livefyre, or other systems.

7. Selected contact information. In the first version of the social media press release, we encouraged all forms of contact info, but we now recommend you use your best judgement for what to include. If you’re not active on Twitter, don’t include a Twitter handle or you’ll just give the impression of not understanding social.

8. Invisible to you but known to the company publishing it, the entire press release is embedded inside a marketing automation system. If you’ve got a cadre of reporters, content producers, and journalists that you’ve engaged with in the past, you can see from the back-end data who has found it interesting and who has shared it.

For Wednesday and Friday

As a group write a SM press release for your client in general. 

Individually, write a SM press release for a specific topic for your client. 

Each press release must include ALL aspects of sharable social media:

• Video

• Audio

• Photo gallery 

• Written quotes from newsmakers

Plus all of the correct information a news outlet needs to create content about your client. Use the suggestions from Shift Media to create a checklist of what you need.