The next time you write a press release, give the reporter a reason NOT to delete your release, otherwise you might as well write “For Immediate Delete” in the subject line. I had originally planned to showcase great examples of press releases from this week, but couldn’t find any that truly stood out (I looked at the feeds for all the major wires this morning). [Read more...]
Press Release or Press Delete?
The Best Day to Send a Press Release
What is the best day to send a press release? That is one of the most popular questions people ask PR pros – especially from the people that think PR is just writing and sending releases.
You can ask 100 PR professionals this question and get 100 different answers. At least one-third, and typically this is the most-experienced third, will tell you Monday or Tuesday is the best day to send a press release. A lot of this stems out of an age where news was primarily printed on paper or broadcast on TV at a specific time each day. I don’t think there is a ‘best’ day, but that’s just my opinion.
I decided to ask some experts about this topic via Twitter and received some helpful responses from the news wires. PRNewswire suggests sending news in the middle of the week and to steer clear of Mondays and Fridays. Business Wire on the other hand suggests early in the day, early in the week for most press releases. readMedia, a social media release start-up, sees little difference in weekdays, but advises against sending releases on weekends for obvious reasons.
That settles it for me. There is NO best time to send a press release. The ‘best’ time varies depending on your targets and type of news. In some cases, it might not make sense to send a press release at all. If your news is strong – timely, relevant, localized or sensational – you probably don’t need a press release. Just pick up the phone and call the reporter (or shoot them an email). If your press release is weak (be honest), why send it out at all?
Assuming you do have some news of value, and decide to go the release route, you’ll need to figure out the best day for yourself. Here are some suggestions that may help you figure out the best time to send your press release: [Read more...]
How to Write a Press Release?
More than 12,000 times every month “how to write a press release” is searched on Google, delivering more than 49 million search results. Is that the right question to ask? What about “are press releases effective?” That will yield more than 484 million results for you.
This isn’t one of those “the press release is dead” posts, because I personally don’t think they will die anytime soon. It’s just one tool of many we have to choose from today for communicating with audiences. [Read more...]
Press Release Writing Tips (From Journalists)
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know I’m not a huge fan of press releases. But let’s face it, they are a necessary evil for most of us working in public relations.
Why write about press release writing when there are already so many books, posts, tweets and about 29 million other resources on this topic? Have you seen some of the press releases floating around today? It’s clear there are still a few of us that could use some good old fashioned press release writing tips.
Rather than limiting the advice in this post to my personal experience, I thought it would be better to ask some journalists for their advice. After all, who knows better what makes a good press release than the people that have to read them every day. Whether you’re about to write your first release in your internship, or you’ve been writing press releases since I was in diapers, I hope you’ll find these tips useful for writing your next press release.
How Many Press Releases Are Sent Out Each Day?
Any journalist or blogger I talk to says they receive a lot of press releases every day. I recently got a message from a reporter working at a small local paper who received 80 press releases in one day – of which only two were relevant to the information his paper covers. This didn’t surprise me, because I hear this story over and over again. It did get me thinking though, “I wonder how many press releases are distributed each day?”
I’ve tried to find this information before with no luck. I decided to give it another try, this time using Twitter to issue the question to popular news distribution services PR Newswire, BusinessWire, Marketwire and PRWeb. Within a few hours, PR Newswire and BusinessWire responded with almost identical answers: they both send out about 1,000 releases each day (2,000 total), though special features and busy news times can drive this number even hire. Holiday tie-in news releases for example.
