Tweeting to Journalists

One of the most interesting pieces of advice that our book “Social Media Marketing Workbook 2016” by Jason McDonald has given us is, in my opinion, the suggestion to “pitch journalists view Twitter” as a promotion strategy. Tagging journalists in tweets about your company, product or, services can be extremely useful.

According to McDonald, journalists love Twitter because it is where stories seem to unfold the most. By tagging them in tweets you would want them to see, you are grabbing their attention and giving them a potential story that they may want to dive into and explore. By tagging several journalists in promotional tweets, you may just get lucky to the point where they will want to write a promotional story on you or your company. They also might choose to retweet your promotional tweet, which would give you access to a whole new audience of people that follow that particular journalist.

This is useful information, because promoting on Twitter can sometimes be a difficult task. Twitter is very noisy, and it is hard for users to pick out what to pay attention to and what to virtually ignore. Being retweeted or recognized by a journalist would help your promotion to stand out. I’m glad that McDonald gave this advice because before I read this section, I had never thought about tagging journalists. I believe that this knowledge will assist me in my future career in PR, and I will be able to help companies better expand their outreach and audience traffic on Twitter.