Do you often feel like you write a press release, distribute it, and then it goes off to die a sad, lonely death? A lot of people struggle with gaining visibility for their press releases. Fortunately, there are some easy things you can do to make your press releases more visible and more shareable.

With these simple tips, you could start getting your stories spread across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, the blogosphere, and the whole internet.

• Create Tweetable headlines—Think about how content is shared online. When you see someone sharing an article on Twitter or Facebook, what’s the first thing you see? It’s the headline. The title makes all the difference in the world. You need to create compelling, clickable press release headlines. And to make them Tweetable, try to keep your headlines to about 100 characters or less.
• Include social sharing buttons in your press releases—This is a no-brainer. Make sure your press releases always have social sharing buttons when they’re published online, so that readers can click the button and share your story to Facebook, Twitter, or wherever else. This is probably the easiest thing you can do to get more shares.
• Embed “Click to Tweet” links in important snippets—Make your press release more interactive by embedding a Click to Tweet link within the most important message in the story. It might be a key statistic or an interesting quote. Choose an interesting snippet and make it to where someone can click it and Tweet it out.
• Add a visual element—PR Newswire released a study a couple years ago showing that multimedia news releases got shared about 3.5 times more often than plain text new releases. Adding photos, videos, slides, infographics, etc. to your press releases makes them more eye-catching, appealing, interesting, and shareable.
• Write something your audience actually cares about—If nobody cares about your story, it won’t get shared, no matter how many cool images it contains or social sharing buttons are on the page. It really all boils down to creating stories your audience cares about and wants to share with others. If you don’t do this, nothing else will matter.

What are some of your best tips for creating more shareable press releases? 

This article is written by Mickie Kennedy, founder of eReleases (http://www.ereleases.com), the online leader in affordable press release distribution. Grab three free ebooks, including the Big Press Release Book and Twitter Tactics, here: http://www.ereleases.com/insider/freebooks.html