By Bob and Janette Speyer, Web Success Team  – 

How would you characterize breaking news? I would define it in 140 characters (or less)! Yep, Twitter is PR’s tip of the spear. I once found out about an earthquake rolling my way in Los Angeles on Twitter before my building started shaking. Seems that it’s faster than Mother Nature, herself!

In today’s social media era of instant gratification, breaking news is no longer the domain of journalists and media outlets. Companies are announcing newsworthy content through their Twitter feeds to control the message before it controls them. Of course, they then follow up with press releases and other traditional PR methods.

When You Tweet, Everybody Listens.

Twitter is now part of mainstream media and a crucial player in the information announcing strategy for Fortune 500 companies to entrepreneurs, mainstream media, PR agency pros and social media companies. Websites are even playing second fiddle to the power of the Tweet.

10 Tips to Increase PR Exposure

1. Synchronize breaking news on Twitter with other company news activities.
2. Create a Twitter account for news and publish all newsworthy content from that platform. By channeling your Twitter news, journalists will have more chance to pick it up.
3. Keep your content fresh and current.
4. To stand out on the Twitter feed, upload an image with the newsworthy Tweet.
5. Use trending hashtags in your tweets to optimize your news. Keep the hashtags “white hat” by using only relevant hashtags.
6. Monitor the Twitter feed using a platform such as TweetDeck.
7. Use Twitter to interact with the media. Favorite some of their tweets, praise them for their successful article (that has nothing to do with your company), and share them around as well.
8. Monitor competitors tweets to be able to react to their breaking news that might impact your client
9. Use Twitter for reputation management. Negative tweets can be addressed and often times neutralized.
10. 10. Pitch journalists directly through Twitter for breaking news or story ideas

The Best Time to Tweet

Like anything in life, “timing is everything”. Twitter is no exception to get maximum leverage. Here are a couple of noteworthy tips:

1. Tweeting in the afternoons get a higher click-through rate than mornings.
2. Thursday to Friday get more clicks than earlier in the week.
3. Weekends are the best time to tweet and get the highest CTR

In The Final Analysis

Twitter is “the” essential tool in your PR arsenal. It is growing exponentially and is a powerful strategy to help deliver the message, making news 24/7 at a rate of 400 million tweets a day. Like the old saying, “if you don’t control the message, it will control you!

How do you manage the message using Twitter? Let us know via Facebook, and Google+!