A New Generation Marketer

Social media is a very powerful tool to help leverage a press release on the Internet today. This pas week I demonstrated how to best leverage a major press release primarily via social media. Yes, the release was going to be circulating the web and sent out to major sources (i.e. TechCrunch, CRN, BusinessWire, etc.) but I also needed a way to leverage it within my company’s direct community.

Backupify, the company I work for, was launching a major new service, Google Apps backup. We had great connections all over the tech industry and with bloggers, but also wanted to share it within our own network of contacts.

Here is how we leveraged the press release on social media:

1. We created an outreach program via Facebook and Twitter. As different sites released their coverage of our release and the press release went out later that afternoon, we tweeted it out and shared it on Facebook to let those who may not see the articles otherwise have a chance to read and share it.

(note: we had other sites release their coverage of our new service first to give readers a heads up about the event and get them familiar with it before the press release was published later in the afternoon. This seemed to work very well).

Not only were we able to share about five different articles on social media, but we saw over 120 retweets of them over the course of the day (and more days after). This was social proof that people were reading and liking what we were doing.

It is one thing to push articles out to blogs and sites whose job is to showcase press releases and service reviews, but it is another to have true fans and customers read and voluntarily share that same data.

This helped us confirm that people were out there reading about us, liking what they read, and willingly sharing it. In the age of social networks and sharing, it seemed like an obvious move to utilize our social connections to leverage our backup launch.

2. Aside from simply tweeting it out to the Twitterverse and sharing it on Facebook, we specifically asked brand evangelists to share it in their networks as well. As you can imagine, this helped the message spread even further on the Internet.

3. I retweeted others who commented on our new product release.

4. I kept our Google Alerts open on our RSS to monitor for every new mention of Backupify on the web. From there, we were able to share and comment on the articles to be actively involved with writers and readers.

I have been analyzing the buzz around our release ever since then and there is such an immense amount of tweets, status updates, new news articles and blogs that picked up the press release. Overall, social media was a huge aspect of our product launch and our fans and followers led the pack in spreading the news at lightening speed.

How have you used social media to help leverage a major press release? What were some of the results? Tell me your story below!