Burst Out Of Your Social 'Bubble'
For a tech company, announcing your product or product version using ‘social’ as your primary platform is very limiting in terms of your reach.
Sure, you will reach friends and colleagues old and new, and possibly some industry acquaintances. But even within this group, metrics like LinkedIn’s ‘views’ and ‘likes’ don’t really give you any idea of the true engagement – for example ‘views’ simply means that your post was ‘scrolled past’ on someone’s timeline, while ‘likes’ are mostly given by work colleagues, and even then without ever really engaging with the content beyond the precis that appears in their timeline. And ‘well done team’ and ‘super stuff guys’ in the comments section is nice to have, but no more than that.
Great support in other words, but not definitely no substitute for a proper product launch announcement.
Importance of Vertical Trade Media
And this is why the media, and especially the trade media in your vertical, remains so important. It can bring a much wider – and qualified – audience, which is far beyond the immediate circle of your friends and colleagues. Your vertical trade media is where your industry comes to meet. Everyone subscribers: friends, colleagues, rivals, competitors, partners, investors, skills pool, employees. It’s a place to see and be seen.
Trade media also has industry authority. Trade media writers are specialists in their area – and are considered knowledgeable enough by publishers to carry the all-important credibility of their title in their writing and editing. This is why good PRs make the effort to engage with them for their clients.
All credible media publish their circulation figures. These are real people, and in the case of the trade media titles, they all have an interest in a particular industry or vertical. They are your national and worldwide audience. So by achieving coverage of your new product or service, you are bringing it directly to your market.
Add Ons
It doesn’t end there. The media itself uses social media to amplify and publicise many of its stories, so by appearing in its print edition, you will also benefit from this. The same goes for their email marketing – daily newsletters etc.: and with an industry title, the subscriber base often in the tens of thousands. And there is also SEO and Google alerts - news sites have always ranked very high with Google, so there are huge SEO and alert benefits to be gained here too.
Once published of course, you can use it as third party collateral yourself, including on your news page, but also to gain further traction through your own social channels. And here again, news is very effective – the most effective in fact: recent studies have shown that company news is the number one content draw on social media sites like LinkedIn: in fact LinkedIn’s own report, entitled ‘The DNA Behind the World’s Most Successful Content’ found that ‘news and trends-related pieces’ are most likely to be among the most shared posts, particularly for the tech industry.
Get Started
A simple press announcement gets you and your company beyond the comfortable echo chamber of your immediate circle of friends, colleagues and acquaintances, and in front of your wider industry or vertical audience. Which is why planned PR announcements are so effective and still work so well.
Get started today. Drop Curzon an email, and we can arrange a quick meet up.
Pic: Faughart