Hey, hey everybody. It’s Christina Daves with this week’s Get Famous Friday PR Tip. This week, I want to talk about connecting with journalists on LinkedIn.
Hopefully, you watched my PR tip on HARO, Help A Reporter Out. If you reply to a HARO query, and there’s a journalist that writes about your topic or your industry, connect with them on LinkedIn. Find them, and don’t pitch – look at some of their work, and just say “Hey, I love the articles you’ve written in Inc. and Forbes. I’m in the space. If I can ever be of any assistance to you, let’s connect on LinkedIn, and you can check out my profile.”
Most of your journalists are on LinkedIn. If they’re not on LinkedIn, they’re on Twitter. If they only have 50 connections, don’t bother. Do the same thing on Twitter. It’s a really great way to connect. You used to be able to tag them as press in LinkedIn, but you can’t do that anymore, so make sure, you are using that Google Doc, that Google Sheet to write down their name and their publication. They move around a lot, so you might periodically just hop on LinkedIn and make sure, once you connect, that they’re still with the publication that you’re looking for, or if they moved.
That happened to me – I had somebody who covered me at one publication, loved my story, went to Forbes, called me and said, “Hey, my editor would like to run a story about you. I’ve always loved your story. Now, we’d like to run it here,” which was huge.
That is my big tip today is to connect with journalists on LinkedIn. I hope you’ll start doing that. How about you make a commitment to do five next week?
If you liked this tip and you want more, please join The PR Challenge at www.YourPRChallenge.com, where I give you tips like this for 10 days to help you get massive visibility and more media coverage, or start getting media coverage. I would love to have you join – I’ll see you on the inside.
