One of my favorite parts of my job is collaborating with internal teams on our continual goal to enhance the effectiveness of our clients’ press releases. Business Wire knows that a good reader experience increases the likeliness of message adoption, and that’s why our product and user experience teams work closely with our customers and media contacts to ensure our press release service benefits audiences.
This blog post showcases some of our best – and free! – press release enhancements designed to increase the appeal and usefulness of your news to your readers.
- Your Logo: Build brand mindshare across media, financial and consumer audiences by including your logo and linking it to your website. Upload your logo with your press release and we will ensure it displays with your headline in newsfeeds and is prominently featured when the full release is opened. Adding your logo to your release is a simple way to increase your brand’s visibility.
- Company information: Help audiences understand more about your company by providing a snapshot of key business data. These details can be found on the sidebar next to the full-text release on our website.
- Pull quotes and calls to action: Every Business Wire release includes a call to action to increase audience engagement. Help readers amplify your news by giving them something interesting to share. Prepare a specific tweet or allow our site to rotate direct quotes from within your press release and audiences can share this out with a single click.
- Release Summary: Be sure to prepare and provide a summary of your news. Think of this as the elevator pitch for your announcement, enticing readers to read the full release.
- Real-time Tweets: Your social channels add context to your news release. Add your corporate Twitter account within the submission portal and your three most recent posts will appear in the sidebar of your press release on our website.
- Social Media profile links: Gain traffic, likes and followers with direct links to your social channels.
- Hashtags and cashtags: Do not forget to include relevant hashtags and cashtags to display on the sidebar. These tags link to relevant Twitter discussions, making it easy for readers to see the conversations and topics relevant to your brand and messaging.
- More News link: We know your readers are interested in learning more about your company and offerings. We make this easy by including links to your account’s past three releases on every release.
- Contacts: The most requested element from reporters is easy access to press release contacts. Contact information is displayed twice — once with the release, once in the sidebar — to make it easier for interested parties to quickly get in touch.
Take advantage of these nine free Business Wire press release enhancements to increase both visibility and engagement of your brand and your news across media, financial and consumer audiences.
4 bonus tips to maximize your readers’ experience:
- Write a good headline. Search engines rely heavily on page titles to determine visibility, so think of your press release's headline as its page title. For proper indexing by news sites, your headline should be between 2 and 22 words. For more advice on writing perfect headlines, download our free whitepaper, Writing a Reporter-Friendly News Release.
- Format your body text. Well-formatted news releases increase readability and drive results. To help increase readership, Business Wire incorporates your web-ready, rich-text formatting such as bold, italics, tables, bullets, live hyperlinks and other features. Learn more from this blog post, How to Write a News Release.
- Provide visuals reporters can use with their stories. Press releases that combine text and imagery have higher engagement rates than plain text news releases. To make it easier for audiences to engage, we place your photos, videos, Interactive Media and other content directly between the headline and body of your release. Our multimedia carousel makes it easy for audiences to view, download and share your logo and multimedia assets in a variety of formats with a single click. What kinds of media should you be adding to your news release? Find out in our comprehensive blog post, Moving Beyond Photos – Use Multimedia to Increase the Value of Your News.
- Include translated versions of your news. To maximize release engagement and coverage, press releases distributed outside the U.S. are translated into region-appropriate languages. Many of these associated translations can be accessed within your release on BusinessWire.com. Need more advice on international distribution? Read 8 Tips for Maximizing Your International Press Release on the Business Wire blog.
Learn from your peers: Visit our Sample Press Release page to view examples of well-optimized news releases.
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