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.