This is a guest post from Brendon O’Donovan, Product Marketing Manager at Vocus. 

I have a morning routine: alarm goes off, I reach for my phone, open e-mails, yep, the world’s still alive on that front.  Open Facebook, ok, no zombie apocalypse yet. Ok, the world is right – well almost — time for coffee.

Have you been on Twitter or Facebook yet today? Yeah, me too. Social media has become an ever-present part of our daily lives.   I, like many of you, get my news from social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Google+, and various industry blogs each morning (and then, periodically throughout the day…)  Being present in blogs and social media matters.  Really matters.  The world no longer relies on traditional media alone(though, it is still important and very influential,) blogs have been a staple of online media for a while now, and for good reason.  Blogs connect with an audience on an informal, but familiar level. Social media and blogs represent an opportunity to get people talking about you and your brand. By extending your reach into the blogosphere, you’re reaching a huge audience, becoming visible and connecting with your audience on their preferred media.

This is where PRWeb shines.  PRWeb makes it easy for blogs to cover, share or reference your news in their posts.  In fact, if you look for references to PRWeb in a Google Blog search, you’ll find more than twice as many mentions as our nearest competitor.  How do we make it easy?  We provide a source of high quality, original content (your content!), and very often that content comes with something of paramount importance to bloggers – multimedia! The photos and videos that are included in PRWeb releases are valuable assets to bloggers because they know multimedia (videos, images, etc) engage and keep the readers attention. We know that too.  Our own previously published research finds that readers spend, on average, 30 seconds longer on releases that include any type of multimedia. But how do we know that bloggers want to use this multimedia?  We surveyed them a few years ago and found that 52% have used the multimedia from a news release in their own story.

But it’s not just about coverage. It’s also about the how social media and blogs influence buying decisions. A recent study by Burst Media found that 65.5% of people who visits blogs say that brand mentions within the blog’s content have an influence on their purchasing decisions. Additionally, almost half of people surveyed said that recommendations made by a social connection are either very or somewhat influential in their buying decision.  We previously talked about SEO and the importance of search, and when it comes to the actual path to purchase, 51% of people still use search, but, 48% use a combination of search AND social (only 1% uses purely social.)  So while search is very important, so is social!

So what does this all mean to you?  It means that for you to reach your target audience (your customers) you need to be in the blogosphere and social media.  Why?  Because your customers are paying attention to, and being influenced by, what their favorite blogs and peers say.  How do you reach these key areas of the social world?  PRWeb.

Brendon O’Donovan began his career at Vocus as an account manager, providing guidance, best practices and customer support to clients.  Brendon is now the Product Marketing Manager for Vocus, providing training and education for the sales teams and launch guidance for Vocus’ array of marketing and PR solutions.

Filed under: Facts and Figures, Social Media, User Experience by Stacey Acevero