SURVEY: Being active is not enough to get media coverage - journalists expect high quality content and omnichannel distribution

18-Feb-2018 07:30 am Liana Technologies Journalists want companies to actively send out their current and industry-relevant news. This is the main result that came out from the international journalist survey conducted by Liana Technologies in December 2017. The survey asked journalists and media professionals which factors affect whether or not they’ll read and publish a press release. Liana Technologies conducted the survey in December 2017 and got a total of 618 responses from Europe, Asia and the Middle East. The purpose of the survey was to find out which factors affect that a press releases will be noticed by the journalists and published in media. According to the survey results, being active is the most important thing to get media coverage. Almost 90% of the respondents said they want companies and organizations to send out press releases regularly, even though they can’t always be utilized. However, being active alone is not enough. A rough 90% of the journalists also expect the content to be very fresh and current, while 83% of them said they only read the release if it’s related to the industry or topics they cover. Having a compelling and catchy headline is also important, because over two-thirds of the respondents decide whether to read the whole release based on that. For Tomi Saikkonen, the Vice President of Middle East, Liana Technologies journalists´ high expectations came as no surprise. He identifies the main pain point of companies who compete over media coverage and publicity: “Journalists receive hundreds of emails every day from different companies who want to make into their publications. Companies have to make sure they’re applying some best practices to catch their attention. It’s a shame how often people end up mass posting their releases to the greatest number of people possible because they can’t find, or don’t have resources to search for the right contacts and medias.” The survey also revealed the popularity of social media as media channel. Social media is used by 72% of the respondents for following interesting topics and by 65% for searching them. The most important channel for journalists is Facebook followed by 52% of the respondents. Twitter comes second with 37% and a third of the journalists follow blogs. “PR has spread from traditional print and online medias to social media channels. With more digital channels to handle, the technology partner becomes has a huge impact on the success in media communications. Agile tools enable omnichannel PR by making it easy to share releases in multiple channels and helps targeting them precisely. This makes media communications more efficient and helps companies to build long-term media relations and visibility”, tells Tomi Saikkonen.