Distributing Your Press Release by Using Twitter

When Barack Obama, the elected President of the United States of America, last posted on Twitter on November 5 he had over 90,000 followers, come the New Year though that number had grown to over 150,000 – despite the man not posting a word since election day!

It seems like everybody is “Tweeting” - even the most powerful man in the world.

NASA, 10 Downing Street, BBC News, Steve Jobs from Apple corporation and John Cleese are all happy “Tweeters” and post regularly.  Between them alone they have over 40,000 followers on Twitter – users who receive every one of their regular posts.

There are over 4 million users on Twitter with these 4 million people sending nearly a quarter of a million messages between themselves every month.

For a service that started in the Autumn of 2006 this really is astonishing growth, and it's all the more amazing when you consider that a post on Twitter can consist of no more than 140 characters.

Links to other website are allowed, but considering the craze for Flash-dominated, Javascript-heavy, all-signing, all-dancing websites, Twitter's growth is extremely surprising.

For its very limited and minimalist approach, the service came in for a barrage of abuse when it first came to the attention of the world's bloggers. A couple of years down the line, and nearly all those bloggers that initially criticised it now have their own accounts and are “Tweeting” like a happy canary.

Even established BBC journalist Rory Cellan-Jones declared his admiration for the application in May 2008:

“I was beginning to think Twitter - the micro-blogging service that's all the rage amongst the technorati - was just another fad for people who want to share too much of their rather dull lives. Until this morning.

“When I logged on to my desktop Twitter application (sad, I know) it was alive with Tweets about the earthquake in China. Most of them were from the celebrated technology blogger Robert Scoble, who is famous, perhaps notorious, for receiving a Twitter message every second of the day.”

It has been used not just as a news service, but also as a means of fundraising, covering live events and campaigning.

As a news distribution system, it first came into its own in the autumn of 2007 during the seasonal Carolinian fire outbreak. “Tweets” were sent around users and filtered out into the wider net community. It was news from dozens, if not hundreds of people on the ground where the action was taking place.

As a means of distributing information, NASA grabbed hold of the new media application and used it to distribute the latest updates about its recent exploration to Mars using the Phoenix Mars Lander. Amazingly, the world was first alerted to the presence of water on the red planet, not on the BBC, Fox New or CNN, but on Twitter!

With this exciting development it was only a matter of time before a press release service began using Twitter to distribute items, and free press release service Press Release 001 has stepped up to the plate.

Launched on January 1, all the major categories of Press Release 001 are now also transmitted to the world via Twitter, although, of course, in a condensed version of no more than 140 characters.

It's too early to tell yet just how popular this new type of free press release service will be, but if it is anything as popular as other news services then it will surely play a part in helping to change the strategy of online public relations.