“Newsjacking” can do a lot of positive things for your business, including:
- Boosting your promotional activities,
- Engaging your target audience,
- Improving your brand reputation,
- Increasing traffic to your social channels and website,
- Helping you acquire new customers,
- Boosting your website SEO ranking for keywords.
Great, so what is it?
Newsjacking is when a company or brand use trending news stories to gain free publicity. It can also be referred to as “piggy-backing”.
New stories hit the headlines each and every day on online news outlets and on social media, and the trending stories can go viral around the globe within minutes. Smart marketers make use of these stories to get their businesses seen around the world.
For example, KitKat once stole the limelight when news broke that the iPhone 6Plus was bending in owners’ pockets. The popular biscuit brand released a tweet with the caption, “We don’t bend, we #break.”
That single tweet ended up getting over 27,000 retweets! Many other companies released their own humorous newsjacking, and many more also piggy-backed by engaging in discussion with the brands using the hashtags.
How Can You Use Newsjacking to Promote Your Business?
1. Be On Alert!
News stories break constantly throughout the day, so you need to be alert to what is trending, and what is gaining popularity. It can be hard to follow all of the news, especially when you’re trying to focus your energy and attention on the ones that are gaining momentum.
Make use of automated tools such as Hootsuite to monitor your social media channels. To be a successful newsjacker, you need to keep up with trends and produce content based on them quickly. For practice, piggy-back on trends when they’ve already gained momentum – you’ll still reap some benefits and being able to practice creating content quickly is always useful.
2. Do Keyword Research
It is important that you do keyword research and adopt the best SEO practices. This is because other newsjackers will also be writing on the same trending subjects. There will be high competition and the right keywords will help ensure your blog post, or social media post, is seen.
Make sure your content is easy to read and provide valuable, informative or engaging content to your readers (or better yet, provide content that is all three!).
3. Make Sure Its Original
Newsjacking involves creativity. Your audience may not care about the KitKat, or even the iPhone, but they’ll appreciate the humour. Every news story can be spun, or jacked, to attract the right audience.
Creative flair, which can be honed over time, is what will make you a great newsjacker.
4. Type Fast!
Every marketer out there is on the lookout for trends that they can use to help sell their products and services. Short and long-term marketing strategy is important, but to benefit from newsjacking you need to be able to create content fast! The longer you wait jack a trend, the sooner it becomes old news.
People don’t want a long story – write fast and act quick.
5. Get Your Word Out There
Make sure you push your content out on all of your online channels as quickly as possible. Monitor changes in the news, and enact updates to your newsjacking, where applicable. Don’t jack an old trend, and don’t schedule content on a trend for a future post (unless it’s seasonal and appropriate to do, like a daily post for #ElfOnTheShelf).
Engage with your audience, and note which stories have more impact for your business. These are the ones to focus on going forward.
Do you need help creating content for your business or reaching out to the press and media?
At Excalibur Press we have a team of over 12 publicists, content creators, copywriters, journalists and bloggers in a variety of specialisms writing blogs, website content, video, photography and more for clients on a daily basis.
If you would like to speak to a content creator or publicist or would like more information about our rates and process just call 07305354209 or email [email protected].
Find out more about Excalibur Press at excaliburpress.co.