For many companies, the PR and marketing department may be a PR machine, constantly creating and distributing interesting news and press to share with the World. In the new age of new media you really don’t have to reinvent the wheel, however, for many companies, penning their PR has become rather robotic, with many of the same practices, styles, and tactics being used to get the word out. I receive dozens of PR releases every day, actually, I’m guessing that over the past 10 years I’ve likely received well over 500,000 of them!
With that, I’d like to share a short list of 10 items that anyone creating a press release might/should consider including in their press release:
- A Catchy, short Title – As hard as it is to believe, I see many PR releases come through with no title or simply with a subject “Press Release”. Use a catchy title with good SEO buzzwords and keep it short, about 120 characters max so it can be easily Tweeted
- Corporate Twitter Name – no twitter account? You need to have one, plain and simple!
- Link to Facebook Page – 500,000 million users a day, you’re company needs a FB page, be sure to provide a link to it
- Keywords – at the end of your press release, provide a list of important keywords applicable to the release. This is great for added SEO
- Related Image – If you have a photo, screencap, or image that’s related to your news upload it to your website and provide a link to it – don’t simply drop it in the email with your PR as a ZIP file or large file attachment – if you have a video clip even better!
- Link to the PR release on your corporate website (or on a newswire). Many online editors will appreciate a link to a simple, html format version of your PR
- Link to a related YouTube Video – Not using video yet? You should be and make sure to use youtube. Again this is valuable for sharing, youtube clips are fast and easy to embed and share, and best of all, a short video can tell the whole story. Keep the video under 3 minutes if possible
- Use a valid reply to email when you distribute PR via email – Again hard to believe but if I receive your PR and hit reply to your email and this brings up an email address like noreply@company.com I’m likely going to hit the Delete and ignore your news
- A suggested Tweet – again, at the end of your PR you might wish to provide a short, concise suggested Tweet that a person can quickly copy/paste – people will appreciate it.
- An intro summary – not actually part of your PR, provide a paragraph that describes and summarizes your announcement. This is often very useful for a blogger or for an editor to use in some other way, perhaps in a facebook post or LinkedIn discussion post