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Yesterday, HubSpot acquired social media marketing company oneforty, and like all marketing teams we had to figure out how to get the most buzz from this announcement. While we had a lot of blog and social media promotion planned, we also wanted to make the news release something remarkable that would stand out in the constant stream of thousands of other news releases every day.
When brainstorming ideas for “How can we make this release ‘pop’? Or at least how can we make it different?”, we pretty quickly had the idea to make the press release just a series of Tweets. Each line is less than 140 characters, contains the
#Hub140 hashtag, and has a “Tweet This' link to post that line to Twitter.
It wasn’t like anything we had ever seen before, but it made sense. HubSpot is known for being a bit quirky (think unlimited vacation policy, no offices, and lots and LOTS of orange) and was announcing we were acquiring a social media marketing company that got its start building a directory of Twitter apps. Plus the name oneforty comes from the maximum number of characters in a Tweet.
The results? Well, there were over 1,450 Tweets with the #Hub140 hashtag, and the
http://bit.ly/Hub140 short URL we used in tweets had over 5,000 clicks. Plus the acquisition got coverage in the
Wall Street Journal,
TechCrunch, and
Xconomy.
Reporters, editors and bloggers get dozens, if not hundreds, of news releases every day. You want yours to stand out. Maybe the headline is enough –
HubSpot To Set World Record – but maybe it’s also how the message is presented.
What do you think of the world's first Twitter press release? What are other examples of really innovative press releases you have seen?
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