The most logical social media channel for news if Twitter, because it provides users with real time information and anyone who chooses to listen is able to get involved in the conversation. This recently happened with the protests in Egypt and people getting involved by adding the hashtag #Jan25 to their tweets.

So far Twitter has been the go-to platform for broadcasting news stories and link back to the original article on the publications website but over the past year Facebook has become an alternate destination for content to be hosted rather than just a channel to share the news.

Facebook’s rise in popularity with journalist has seen smaller publications shift away from websites to host the entirety of their news on their Facebook company page. The first to do this is the Rockville Central, who started off as a community newspaper for the Rockville Washington DC area before it moved online, due to costs and now is focusing on making the Rockville Central Facebook page the only place to go to for community news and journalism.

Although a potentially risky move due to Facebook’s poor search capabilities it’s a brave move into a media with a potential 500+ million readership and further displays how Facebook can be used by those who don’t have the resource or knowledge of running a fully fledge news website. With the way people read and access their news this move by Rockville Central could be extremely benificial for them.

Although moving the whole of your news to a Facebook page is not recommended it is vital that you consider Facebook to be a place where at least a copy of your news is published. Tying it in with a Twitter account your making your news easily accessible to those who might want to read about it and more importantly share and discuss it.

The launch of PressRoom version 3.0 brought a load of new features and improvements it the already powerful social media release tool. Now the front end of PressRoom has been given a face-lift to help make your news releases more attractive. PressRoom can be fully designed to suit each individual but as part of the launch of PressRoom v3.0 we have redesigned the standard template to make your news releases look even better.

Although the standard social media news release template has been updated, fully customized template are also available for those who want their PressRoom to tie in with their brand ethos. Examples of companies that have customized PressRooms are KMP Digitata and Christy Towels, who have had their press room designed so that it fits in perfectly with their existing company websites.

For more information on PressRoom and the new standard template or getting your own customized PressRoom then please contact Steve Kitt on 0161 4291497 or steve.kitt@ackura.com

Social Media is a constantly evolving medium that provides us with amazing opportunities to reach existing and new audiences, but we must remain at the forefront of these new developments to get the most out of what Social Media can provide. PressRoom 3.0 is the latest update that further improves upon existing features while also adding in some new and exciting ones.

New Features

A new feature to PressRoom include the addition of the “Notes To The Editor” section where the author can input information that he or she believe could be of interest to the editor that might not be of relevance to the article. This could be company information such as history or previous projects. A new way to add video to your social media releases has been added to make creating you release easier. If you know the YouTube ID of the video you want to use then you can attach it through the ID rather than the search function.

Improved Features

By listening to our client’s feedback on PressRoom in addition to keeping up to date with the latest social media developments we have made improvements to the following features:

1. Improved YouTube Search. PressRoom Youtube integration now allows you to search by either Tag or Category for the videos you want to include in your news releases. This improves the searches you perform and will help you find the videos you want quicker.
2. Improved Flickr integration. The integration of Flickr into PressRoom has been overhauled to improve the overall experience. Actions done with Flickr will now reflect in your press release, so if you chose to remove an image from the Flickr account the image will also no longer appear as a broken image link in your press release.
3. Quote and Key Fact order. Time stamps have been applied to both Key Facts and Quotes so that they are arranged in the order that you chose to input them.
4. New Authorising for Twitter and Delicious. Both Twitter and Delicious changed their login details and PressRoom v3.0 has been updated so that these new login methods are now taken into account.
5. New Style Login Page. The Ackura website got redesigned in the summer and now the login pages have been updated to match the new Ackura design.

PressRoom continues to be a powerful tool for creating Press Releases that are perfectly suited for sharing over social media and with these latest updates it is further improved.

For a demonstration or sign up to PressRoom and see how it can help you then contact Steve Kitt at steve@ackura.com.

What PressRoom is designed to do is optimise the same news and press releases but for distribution to the social web: There’s no reason why you shouldn’t run both services side by side.

In designing PressRoom, we’ve paid particular attention to ensuring that news is optimised for the social web:

• News releases are optimised for Google News & Yahoo News and distributed to a host of blogging and news aggregation services.
• News is distributed through Twitter by automatically generating tweets which include the title of each press release with shortened url to the full article.
• Embedding YouTube videos and Flickr images brings in rich media content.
• Press releases are automatically added to Delicious social media bookmarking account.
• Google Analytics reporting compliments the comprehensive dashboard tracking from Technorati Cosmos, Yahoo Site Explorer & Delicious.

Which is great news for those who are looking to effectively integrate social media marketing into their online press & news service and engage a wider audience.

You can also search the whole of the Flickr site for Creative Commons Licensed images to use, this gives you access to an enormous amount of imagery, even if you do not have your own Flickr account.

What Is Creative Commons?

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that works to increase the amount of creativity (cultural, educational, and scientific content) in “the commons” — the body of work that is available to the public for free and legal sharing, use, repurposing, and remixing.

Creative Commons licensing means that you can use the imagery with certain restrictions. The licenses that we have included in the search are:

• Attribution License
• Attribution-ShareAlike License
• Attribution-NoDerivs License
• No known copyright restrictions

All of these licenses allow for commercial use of the images, and PressRoom automatically inserts a link back to the original image on Flickr in order to satisfy the attribution requirements of the license.

The browse dialog works in exactly the same way as the recently added YouTube video browser. If you have a Flickr account set-up for use with PressRoom; the default view will be of your own photos. If you do not have a Flickr account registered or if you click on the “Public Photos” tab, you can see the most recent photos added to the site and search by keyword for anything that you might need.

Brian Solis describes Social Media Releases:

Social media releases are designed to get the conversation going, providing readers with the ability to disseminate information and multimedia, bookmark and share the content, and in turn, spark threads. They also serve a purpose of providing new media influencers with the information they need, in one package, in order to write a full story, their way – without having to carve out the BS of a traditional release or pitch.