Oh, dear. The emails started on Tuesday afternoon from the team: “Hey Nicole, are you posting Toolbox today?” They 
continued to come Wednesday. So did the client deadlines and new business meetings that had to be handled first. And, then all of a sudden it’s Friday. And the Tuesday Toolbox had not been posted. Whoops.
Better late than never. My apologies, dear reader! This edition is packed with lots of GREAT tips for pr and social media. Here’s our teams suggested reading for the week. And, as always, we’d love to hear about what you’re reading.
Julia‘s pick: How to Take Public Relations a Notch or Two ‘Furthur’
Who doesn’t want to learn a lesson in PR from Furthur? For brands, maintaining and growing your audience can be done with a few simple points to keep top of mind: keep content extremely relevant, fresh, genuine and full of new ideas.
Brittany‘s pick: 10 Tips and Tricks for Powerful Twitter Search
With over 2,000 tweets posted every second, this article features useful tips on how to get the most out of your Twitter searches. Most useful tip? How to search tweets from a certain user. If you’re wondering if your product/service/brand is relevant to a particular influencer or journalist on Twitter, there’s a search technique you can use to sift through their tweets for keywords that relate to your brand. This will help publicists create more relevant and tailored pitches.
Alicia‘s pick: 6 Steps to Pitch Journalists (that will always work)
This article suggests connecting with journalists BEFORE you pitch them, via the comments section of their latest articles. I find this approach interesting for a few reasons – it encourages you to read the publication you most care about, and often; it requires you to not only read someone’s articles, but to thoughtfully respond, which increases your engagement with the content; and it develops good relationships with writers before you even ask them for something.
Ben‘s pick: 5 Effective Tips For Optimizing An Online Press Release For Search
When properly optimized, online press releases can increase your online visibility and attract traffic to your website. So put some thought into your next release and use these five tips to help it stand out in a crowd.
Liz‘s tip: 4 free Instagram measurement tools
Brands are really starting to warm up to the idea of launching company Instagram accounts but, aside from monitoring the channel on a daily basis, users want to know what strategies are working and how they can improve. Thanks to some new tools, social media managers can now FINALLY start to measure success and engagement on Instagram (yippee!).
Michael’s pick: Tool to Detect Press Release Copy in News Stories Debuts in US
A new tool called Churnalism allows the public to copy and paste text from a news story to find out if – and how much – of the story’s copy is, well, copied (from Wikipedia or press releases). While helpful to the public for tracking where their news is coming from, Churnalism will be helpful to PR pros to monitor what kind, and exactly how much of their written content is being used in order to tailor future releases for optimal media consumption.
The post Tuesday Toolbox: The ‘So What if it’s Actually Friday?!’ Edition appeared first on People Making Good.
