The long and (very) short of pitching stories on Twitter

Get better results by making your story ideas brief and focused

You thought you had pitching down. You’ve written clever press releases and e-mail pitches, and you can cold-call with the best of them. Face your next challenge: Twitter, and a whole new way to pitch, using 140 characters or fewer.

Don’t worry, twitpitching isn’t difficult, it just takes some research, an informative link, and a lot of editing. As more and more journalists join Twitter, the popular social media site offers an opportunity for PR professionals and corporate communicators to form a relationship with their media counterparts, along with a forum in which to pitch story ideas.

The term “twitpitch” was coined about a year ago when social media consultant Stowe Boyd asked that PR pros pitch him at the Web 2.0 Expo via Twitter. He used the hashtag #twitpitch to make the pitches searchable and trackable, and found that the short pitches were a success. He liked them so much that he began requiring companies to pitch exclusively via tweets.