How many press releases a year?…and how much time spent on building your social media fan base?
Some of you have emailed me with some very good PR questions. First I want to say I am so glad you are asking. This makes my job easier and can help both you and other businesses out in their marketing efforts.
The first, and very good question: “How many press releases should my company should send out every year?”
Most any good marketing company out there will recommend sending out releases consistently. Ideally once a month. However, you may not have that much news (if you don’t, come see me. We need to give you a better strategy for generating coverage and getting you some news). But in all practicality you should be sending out a press release whenever you have something to say. Use anything you can to generate publicity. Holding a charity dinner? That’s worth talking about. Giving lectures or workshops? Talk about it. Doing something nice in your community, donating, going green, coming out with a new line of products, just hired new people? That’s all good stuff to talk about.
The other important question I’d like to address: “There are so many social networking sites that I just don’t have time for them all. What are the ones I should really pay attention to, how can I build my fan base on them effectively and how much time do I really need to spend doing this?”
Let me be the first to say I completely understand. It’s my job to get on and join in the social network discussions all day and it can still seem like that’s all I’m doing if I don’t do it right. There are a few things you can do to first cut your time and still participate and also build your base in a more effective way. I want you to go right now to a site called Friend Feed and get an account. Yes, I know, one more thing to sign up on. But this will save you because Friend Feed is a site that connects to a lot of other social networking sites. When you send something out from here it sends your message out to your other sites for you. The other thing you can do to build up your fan base is to participate with more popular groups and pages. These are places filled with your target market’s interests. You want to get people to know about your company through Facebook, for example. So you build a group on Facebook that caters to the interests of your target. Then you join other groups with similar interests and make friends. You then ask those friends to check out your group. Before you know it you are very popular and lots of people know about who you are.
Please keep the questions coming.
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