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Who to Target?
So to whom do you send your optimized electronic press releases? It’s a mix of different online media.
First, you need to target news-oriented websites and online publications in your industry. These sites are much like traditional media, in that you have to deal with a mix of editors, staff reporters and reviewers, and freelance writers. When the site's big enough and the staff's large enough, you're likely to find separate editors and writers and reviewers to pitch your stories to. Smaller websites and publications, however, are likely to have much smaller staffs. (In fact, some sites have one-person staffs—it's all run by a single guy or gal, with most if not all of the writing outsourced.)
You can also pitch your wares to freelance writers and reviewers—those who provide content to the websites and online publications and blogs. Most of these folks write for multiple sites, so you can often get a good bang for your efforts by pitching across multiple segments.
Blogs are also a great place to plug your wares. There are lots of bloggers out there, and they have lots of posts to write. Convince the bloggers that speak directly to your target audience to talk about your company or product, and you'll gain a certain legitimacy among the followers of those blogs.
Finally, you need to target the social media—Facebook, Twitter, and the like. Targeting social media, however, is much different from targeting other online sources.
You see, you can’t just post a press release on your Facebook page and expect anyone to notice; nor can you condense a press release to a 140-character tweet and broadcast it to your legion of followers.
You can, however, translate the key information in a press release to a format that should work on Facebook and Twitter. You can even include a link in tweet or status update to the complete press release posted elsewhere online. But you can't just tweet "New press release posted;" you have to convey the message in the press release as information of interest to your Twitter followers and Facebook fans.