Connecting With Journalists on Twitter

Introducing our first guest blogger Belinda Bull, owner of the increasingly successful Net2Nana online gift shop for mums, grandmas or any lady who deserves a fabulous treat.

Just 12 months ago Belinda started using Twitter and one of her main objectives was she wanted magazine articles about her new online business published in a selection of relevant, targeted publications.

12 months on she reflects on what worked well and shares these tops tips with you.

The recently published 4th Annual Digital Journalism Study showed that 47% of journalists used Twitter “as a source”. With this information to hand we really can’t afford not to build relationships with journalists and let them help us promote our businesses.

So here are my top 10 tips to make sure you are using Twitter to it’s full advantage.

1. Make sure your Twitter profile reflects what you want your business to be known for and what your area of expertise is.
2. Raise your Twitter profile, become known as an expert in your field and make it easy for journalists to find you as well as you finding them.
3. It’s never too soon to start building relationships with journalists on Twitter, plenty of companies start tweeting weeks before they even officially launch. Even once you have a built up a rapport with a journalist they can be working several months ahead so the time to start working on having your product/company featured in a publication may be up to 12 months in advance.
4. Use and love hashtags – #journorequest, #mediarequest etc. but add one to any tweet that you want journalists searching for info on a particular subject to find.
5. Be prepared to do some unpaid, uncredited work for a journalist before they run a great feature on you! I supplied one writer with a couple of quotes before she pitched my story to an editor, my reward was a fab 500 word article about my company complete with photos and links to my website.
6. Follow all the journalists connected to your field, chat, tweet, retweet and communicate with them. Don’t be too upset if some don’t follow you back.
7. Everyone loves to be flattered so if they make any relevant tweets about your industry acknowledge this by retweeting (RT) them.
8. If you write a piece on a blog make sure you put a link to it on Twitter, it’s a great way to expose your writing to a wider audience and raise your profile as an expert.
9. Similarly, if you write a press release provide a link and tag it with #journorequest, ask journalists if they’d like you to email them a copy. This is so much better than sending unsolicited press releases.
10. Don’t forget it’s a two way deal, the journalists want plenty of new, lively, interesting, informative copy to fill their publications and you want publicity for your company!

I also feel I should mention media strategist Michelle Drapeau, Twitter name @Lexi_Pop, a lovely lady who’ve I’ve got to know through Twitter, her blog www.lexipop.co.uk provides free information to help businesses gain publicity in the press The Writing Shop.

Enjoy connecting on Twitter and you’ll be surprised what you can achieve with 140 characters! I’d love to know about your experiences too.

Belinda Bull - Net2Nana

Look out for Net2Nana in next months Best magazine July 2011 & Essentials August 2011.

How to Use Social Media More Effectively...

"How to use Social Media more Effectively", this is the title for the Workshop I'm delivering next week with Rather Inventive a rather clever, company who help local businesses to use the internet more effectively.

Here I'll summarise the main topics to be covered.

1. Why use Social Media in the first place?

Generally, the people I meet seem to agree that they need to implement Social Media but are still uncertain as to why. Those that still require convincing often it's because Social Media is less relevant to their audience and the type of industry that they're in or they're reluctant to change from what they already know.

The other day a colleague of mine brought this Wine Blog http://www.underwoodwines.blogspot.com/ to my attention. The owner discusses how many sales he receives as a result of Social Media Marketing in his article titled, "The Social Grapevine". What I found most interesting was this question he came across when completing a Social Media Questionnaire for a child's school project.

"Would you (on a scale of 1-10) say you were more likely or less likely to do business or buy a product from a company or person you have engaged with on social media?

Without hesitation I ticked 10 and then realised what had happened. Social media had become so powerful that I would put any company I had engaged with above those I had not. Not as stupid as it sounds though, social media lets you meet the human behind the brand, get to know the personality before you walk in the door. Lets face it, at the end of the day people do business with people. Its a phrase used a lot by a company I have engaged with and met up with through twitter, Local Faces, and they are right. Social media is just that, people talking to other people."

Valid point? I think so. So at the start of the workshop we'll be thinking about "What are the reasons for getting involved with Social Media?".

Dilemma - Engaging your Audience

When I got asked to do this presentation, The initial problem is pitching the content at the right level to meet the audiences expectations and level of knowledge. I hope to achieve a good balance of explaining the "Bigger Picture" where Social Media is concerned and have enough detail for the more advanced users to pick up some tips as well.

This can also be a problem with Social Media. The first thing you need to understand is who your target audience are and what they are interested in before you start to write your blog article.

We hope to run some exercises that help you examine this in more detail for your own business. You can then take these back and implement them later.

Social Media Benefits:

I hope that soon people will not only understand what the benefits of Social Media are but see them working for their own business. So we'll also be discussing why use Social Media in the first place. For me there are two main reasons firstly because the older, more traditional ways of marketing are simply having less affect than they used to and secondly I see a better conversion for people that have actively sought my services - rather than me approaching them. Thirdly, because I have limited staff resources and therefore see Social Media a better investment of my time, fourthly... well you'll have to attend the workshop to here the other benefits!

Top Tips

Top Tips for improving how you use some of the most popular UK Social Media platforms concentrating on: Blogs, Twitter and LinkedIn. I don't profess to know everything about social media, although hopefully more than some. We will share our top tips for social media and find out what works best.

Any other business - All our workshops aim to be interactive, informative and fun and we hope that you all manage to learn some new skills to implement back at the office.

So if you have any questions you'd like answered, just let me know.

To attend any or all of the series of 6 action based marketing workshops please visit...

http://www.ratherinventive.com/internet-marketing-workshops