Traditional PR has changed and the chance to facilitate online PR opportunities, alongside traditional relationships, is huge. An element of connecting online is finding PR opportunities for clients using social media. By utilising social media (and namely Twitter) in the most effective way possible, you can monitor the coverage of competitors, connect with influencers and find PR opportunities within traditional media. In this post, we’ll show you some quick tricks using Twitter’s best kept secret, Twitter search, that will help you to do this and more.
Why Twitter?
Let’s explain our reason behind using Twitter, which sometimes gets as a bad rap, as your channel of choice. Firstly, Twitter is a powerful search engine just waiting to be used! By learning the right combinations you can quickly cut out all of the noise and only zoom in on the media opportunities you need for your clients. How many channels can you say that for? Secondly, Twitter is growing its stakes in the live news field, with CEO Jack Dorsey labelling it the ‘people’s news network‘. This makes it a natural habitat for your target audience such as media managers, influencers and journalists to sit within. Lastly, people turn to Twitter to ask for help from their network and are more receptive when contacted on Twitter which is far less formal than sending an email. For that reason alone, it’s the perfect place to build rapport or offer help from your expert client to a journalist or writer.
Twitter Searches That Uncover PR Opportunities
Here are a few of the great Twitter searches you should know that will uncover great PR opportunities for your clients.
#journorequest OR #PRrequest
This is perhaps the most obvious and one you may already use. The hashtags #journorequest and #prrequest are used often when a Journalist is trying to find someone to comment or be interviewed for a story. Save this Twitter search in Twilert and you can setup hourly, daily, weekly or real time email alerts as often as you need them, to ensure you don’t miss an important request.
Here’s an extra tip too; you know how often you see accounts using the #journorequest hashtag to try and gain more traction, even when they aren’t necessarily using it in the right context? Through the power of Twitter search you can exclude all of those results to see only the PR opportunities that are genuinely interesting to your clients.
For example, you could add the keyword ‘interview’to your search so that it reads interview #journorequest OR #prrequest
Already, you can see that all of the tweets appearing are genuine interview requests from journalists or people supporting some form of media. You can narrow this down even further with additional keywords too, to ensure that you only see the opportunities that would suit your clients. For example, if your client is a politician you can add the hashtag ‘#politics’ or if they want to achieve PR coverage in a specific city or region you can add that as a keyword too.
Remember, Twitter search is all about closing in on the right keywords and finding the balance between enough keywords to make your results super relevant and not too many that you exclude opportunities. Have a play around and we guarantee you’ll begin to get really good at finding PR opportunities specifically for your clients, fast.
Searching by Twitter account
As a PR pro, making relationships and uncovering new journalistic talent is probably one of your key jobs. But have you ever wished you could keep your contact list up to date, in a way that’s simple and doesn’t involve hours of internet trawling? Using the Twitter search panel, you can.
Simply add in the keyword ‘journalist’ along with a second keyword from your niche (for example ‘travel’) and then select ‘people’ from the Twitter search filtering tools.
As you can see, this begins to filter the journalists who work within travel that you could connect with, follow, tweet or add to a specific list in order to monitor any tweets that may pose PR opportunities for your travel-expert client.
The great thing about the account search tool is that it works for any niche and it allows you to expand your contact list outside of the traditional realms of print or magazine journalism. Using this search filter you could find bloggers, YouTube stars, writers, journalists, zine-writers, company heads and more that you could support or who could support you in gaining more PR coverage.
Searching by intent
As well as using traditional hashtags that you know will be used by journalists you can also search by intent. Some of the most common phrases used on Twitter are ‘I need’ and ‘Can anyone help’, which both indicate the intent to find assistance. When paired with the correct form of secondary keywords, these are a quick way to find people looking for interview candidates or companies to cover.
Below, we comprised a search that looked for the keywords looking + for + expert + interview and found multiple tweets from journalists looking for an expert to interview, who hadn’t used any obvious hashtag like those mentioned above. Searching Twitter with real language used by real people is how you can find the opportunities that others may miss.
Searching by intent can also be used to help out people (journalists included) which builds rapport and will get you noticed and potentially followed. If someone’s asking for help tracking down a specific person or company and you don’t have a client who fits the bill, could you recommend someone else you know who does? This will show you as helpful and willing which goes a long way when building future relationships.
Searching by user handle or competitor
It’s impossible to monitor every conversation happening on Twitter all of the time, but with the right Twitter searches (and Twilert’s easy-to-follow email digests) you can track the ones you need to see. As well as searching the Twitter pool, you could also search for tweets sent by specific user handles, or even tweets sent from or to your competitors.
For example, the search to:PRMediaBlog would show you all of the tweets sent to the user @PRmediaBlog. This can be applied to any user handle, helping you to uncover exactly the tweets being sent to or from your competitors with opportunities that you could help support. Of course, you don’t want to try and manipulate opportunities that others have already uncovered, but if another PR agent can’t help, or there’s an opportunity for multiple candidates to be interviewed, why couldn’t you offer assistance?
Using Twitter Search to Find PR Opportunity
Twitter search really is a hidden secret that will help you uncover daily opportunities for your clients alongside your traditional PR practices. Many PR experts are just beginning to realise the potential of joining up their social media skills with public relations and there’s no reason why you can’t use this to get ahead of any opportunity that might interest your client.
We believe that the easiest way to be the first on the scene of new PR opportunities is to save your searches and have an easy-to-read and reply to email digest appear in your inbox on a schedule that suits. To get started, enjoy a 30-day free trial of Twilert at https://www.twilert.com.
