Rather than rehashing press releases, why don’t tech blogs just tweet them out instead?
On Friday evening, I was sent a press release announcing that a Swedish Startup had raised a Series A.
I run The Nordic Web, a tech blog focusing on the Nordic Startup Scene, however, we focus on analyses and opinion pieces, rather than ‘news’.
Therefore, we don’t blog about funding rounds directly, but, I decided to tweet the news from The Nordic Web Twitter account instead.
Now, bearing in mind this was tweeted early on a Saturday morning by an account with ‘only’ 2,000 followers, if I was the startup, I would be pretty happy that 24 hours later 1,390 had seen the news, and 34 people had engaged with it further, including 23 clicking through to the full press release.
This got me thinking, what if, instead of tech blogs rehashing press releases and throwing in the names of a couple of competitors, they simply tweeted a summary and a link to the full press release.
The startup would still get their news shared, the tech blog would still be ‘covering’ the news, and the readers get the ‘important’ news: ‘X raises X to challenge Y’ and can click the link if they want to read more.
Let’s run a little scenario:
TechCrunch has nearly 5M Twitter followers, around 2,500x the amount The Nordic Web has.
So, if we use that as the rule of thumb, then if TechCrunch had tweeted about the Swedish Startup’s piece of news then 3.475M would have seen it, with 85,000 engagements and 57,500 clicking through to read more, within 24 hours. (And don’t forget this was on a Saturday morning)
According to it’s ‘About’ page, TechCrunch gets 12 million uniques and 37 million page views per month, so it’s even safe to assume that more people would have seen the tweet within 24 hours, than if TechCrunch had blogged about it.
So, more exposure for the startup, at least in the immediate term.
As a reader, I don’t understand the value in a whole post dedicated to a startup’s funding round or latest update, especially when it is essentially just a rewritten press release. I do however understand that there is a need for this piece of information to be reported in the public domain, but I would much rather read a tweet (with the option of reading more) than a full blog post.
I would rather my favourite tech blogs were focusing on producing original analyses, thought pieces and ‘breaking’ news. There is little value in rewriting a press release, if you’re intent on sharing the news, why not just share the original press release(!)
If you have any thoughts on this, or tech journalism in general then you can find me on Twitter @neilswmurray
