How To Take the Best Advantage Of Your Press Release Service with Social Media

The humble press release service is probably the most overlooked SEO tools on the market. You bust out a sweet press release and it hits the news channels, and traffic pours in for a few days. Once it dies down, you release another, and so on…but is that the best you can do?

Of course it’s not — there are some extraordinary interactions between social media and press releases that are often ignored.

Twitter
When you send a press release to PRWeb, for example, you get an option to tweet it when it goes live. Take it! Even if you only have a dozen followers, there’s a chance one of them will retweet (especially if you ask them to), and you can get surprising coverage.

Above and beyond that, you can use a tool like Hootsuite to schedule tweets hours or days later with the link to the release. Just make sure that each tweet points out a different, relevant aspect of the press release.

Facebook
Your business’ Facebook page should link to the press release, not just through your status, but through your Links page. Include images to increase the impact, and ask your followers to share it with their followers and fans.

Blogs
You can use the press release as your next blog post, 72 hours or so after it’s released. Don’t cut and paste it; summarize and link to the PRWeb version of the release. If a release really is genuinely newsworthy and it’s getting real attention, don’t hesitate to contact other relevant bloggers and ask them to post their response to the story.

Social Bookmarking
PRWeb has a ‘Share This’ button that opens up a dialog with several prominent social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Google Buzz, Reddit, and so on. Do this. If you don’t already have accounts on all of those sites, create them — at the minimum, on all four listed plus Digg, Delicious, Kirtsy, Slashdot, and Technorati.

As you develop these strategies, not only will your press releases hit more eyes, but they’ll have more staying power, so they won’t die off as quickly.