Publicity Hound Holly Miller of Chesapeake, Virginia emailed me this morning and and asked if it’s proper to include a Twitter address within a press release.
It’s a great idea, and it got me thinking about other ways to let people know where they can find you online.
—If you’re on MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, do you include links to your profile pages in press releases? What about other social networking sites your followers might want to know about?
—Do you cross-promote from every social networking site? for example, can people find your Twitter address on your LinkedIn profile?
—Does the home page of your website include links to your social networking profiles?
—What about your email signature?
—What special applications do you use at social networking sites that help pull traffic to your profile?
Let’s see how many ideas Publicity Hounds can suggest.
I sometimes add my twitter ID to the resource box of my articles.
My new web site will have a little graphic linking to my Twitter account and one to my LinkedIn account. But I don’t want to overwhelm people with links, so I’m pretty conservative about advertising the profile elsewhere.
I don’t recommend using free press release distribution services for two reasons:
–Most don’t “distribute” anything. They simply park your press release at their website.
–Most don’t have help desks. So if you submit a release and discover an error later, like a typo in a URL, you’re out of luck.
Hi Joan,
A few of the things I do are:
1. I autofeed my blog articles through my various social networking pages that allow it.
2. I also use the service http://www.lijit.com where people can see the various sites I am registered on.
3. On my myspace page and my blog I have neatly lined links to my other pages (but they are out of the way so that they are not overwhelming):
To see sample visit http://www.teenentrepreneurblog.com and scroll to bottom right hand corner.
And I’ve also gotten a number of friend requests from putting my social networking address in my forum signatures. It helps alot if you share quality information and acknowledge others in your online network.
I have links to selected social media accounts in the sidebar of my main blog. Haven’t placed them in my eMedia kit yet–but that is a good idea!
Joan, since you don’t recommend using free press release disribution services, if a business owner does not have funds to use a paid press release service, what is a good alternative?
I use social networking sites a lot, but have not thought of including my Twitter or Facebook IDs.
This is a good suggestion. I’ll give it a go.
Sadly, the media has some catching up to do when it comes to Twitter. Even when we sent out a news release explaining what it was and how we were using it, the response was, “Huh?”
So when time came to announce our “What’s New for ’09” expansion project, we used Twitter a lot to hint around and tease about our $8.4 million expansion.
Our Media Advisory about the upcoming announcement informed the media that a pre-announcement would be made via Twitter 15 minutes before the on-site announcement for the media. THAT got their attention and we’ve been featured in several articles specifically talking about Twitter because of it.
We link to our blog from our homepage, and our last few tweets are alongside our blog, with a link to the rest. Works well.
Paula Werne
Holiday World PR
New in ’09: Pilgrims Plunge! The World’s Tallest Water Ride
This is in response to Neng’s comment above, re small business owners who can’t afford paid press release distribution services.
A blog is a terrific way to pull in traffic, so post your information there.
Also, create a video about your news, tag it correctly, and post to YouTube and other video sharing sites.
Publicity Hounds, these ideas are fabulous! Keep ’em coming. I’m making a to-do list.
I have never thought about including my social networking sites (Facebook and Twitter) in my press releases. Is it really a good idea to include this information? I sometimes include this information into articles I write but never a press release.
Shannon, why wouldn’t you include at least one social networking link within your press release?
Remember, these days, smart Publicity Hounds don’t write press releases only for the media. They write them for consumers who can find the release online while Googling, read the release, and click on a link—thereby bypassing the media gatekeepers.
The rule of thumb is no more than about 5 links within a press release. And you certainly want to include links that are the most relevant, according to what the release is discussing. But I see nothing wrong with including a link explaining where people can follow you on Facebook or Twitter.
Who knows? Maybe a journalist will see link and start following you!
I am not sure that putting all of them in the signature is a good idea.. I think you should put you website or blog url and one other thing you want to peromote, a book Title, your myspace URL, or whatever is the next most important. More than that is clutter and you might lose your target.
David John Berndt, Ph.D.
authorfriendly.wordpress.com
publicist for http://www.readcharlottehughes.com
Hi hounds 🙂
Shift Communications has a fantastic free PDF download with *excellent* recommendations on SOCIAL MEDIA PRESS RELEASE format. This resources provides great ideas and really updates the traditional press release format: http://tinyurl.com/327owq
Once you see this … it will make perfect sense and have you asking yourself WHY haven’t you already been doing this! 🙂 Good luck to all!
Mayra
There is a BRAND NEW website made just for this it is called iblaast.com
there goal is to have it be the place you go to search for all things social networks. I think they are still in testing phase but we are still able to create profiles. I’m going to check it out today.
It is a great way to promote your public profile. You can easily promote yourself, your group, your band or your online organization. I love the link feature. You can add your network url links to your public profile page- it is really cool! I recently added my profile to the site. I suggest you chsck iBlaast out. I have provided a link to the site for you, enjoy! http://www.iblaast.com/Individuals
The best way to promote your band is with Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Youtube and OOiZiT.com