How Twitter Can Become The Best Pitching Platform Ever

By Ben Haber

July 13th, 2009

I recently wrote a post about how journalists were getting very tired of phone pitches and preferred receiving them via email or Twitter. In the post I mentioned how Twitter could become a great pitching platform if not for a few things holding it back.  So, here is how Twitter can make itself the best pitching platform for journalists and PR people.

The first step is to create a new communication option/folder beyond a @reply and a DM. This option would be specifically for pitching and does not require someone to follow you. It would allow PR people to send 140 character pitches to journalists through a separate folder within Twitter, where they can be read and either responded to or discarded. Here are a few benefits to this method:

• Since journalists can’t follow everyone, this will allow them to still receive pitches without having their regular Twitter stream full of tweets they don’t want.
• Since pitches will be 140 characters or less, journalists won’t have to spend a lot of time reading them and PR people can get right to the point.
• PR people will have a great way to share news with relevant journalists they may not have existing relationships with.

To enhance this feature even more, each message should have 3 options for journalists. They can either respond, archive, or trash the message. Once they select which option, the PR person will be automatically notified so that there are no follow-up calls needed (a common complaint from journalists). If the journalist doesn’t like the topic then the PR person will know and can move on. If the message is archived it means that the reporter might have use for it later, and if the journalist responds then it’s a win-win for everyone.

To take this a step further, this system could also make things really easy for journalists. When they are looking for sources for an article, instead of posting their request to HARO or ProfNet and waiting for the emails to be blasted out, they can simply send their request on Twitter and have pitches sent to their pitch folder.

Additionally, if anyone abuses this system journalists can simply block the user so they won’t receive any more messages from them.

Can you think of any other ways we can make Twitter an amazing pitching tool for all?

Entry Filed under: PR Tools, Twitter