PRWeb and Photobucket Partner to Give Your Press Releases Larger Exposure via Image Sharing
PRWeb today announced a partnership with Photobucket, to help online marketers expand the reach of their press releases published via PRWeb to a larger community. Photos uploaded to PRWeb will automatically be shared through a co-branded Photobucket-PRWeb site. Press releases enhanced with images get more traffic through image search, are more visually appealing, and have important advantages over all-text releases.
“Using relevant images in news releases has been shown to improve metrics including the length of time of readers spend reviewing a news release and click-through rates,” said Jiyan Wei, director of Product Management for PRWeb.
Images are an important part of a multimedia press release. Multimedia is not a new concept, as you probably know, it’s been around for some time. But PRWeb is one of the few ezine distributors that understand that “multimedia” means distributing the various elements of a release via all possible channels. This doesn’t simply happens by releasing a press release onto the web, but by closing partnerships with the companies that can actually maximize the exposure of a multimedia release.
Image search is one of the continuously growing sectors of the search market. Images integrated with news releases often appear on consumer sites like Google Image Search, Google News, sometimes superseding other related images, provided that the content is relevant and that the images are properly SEO optimized. Photobucket images are made available to a community of 22 million unique visitors each month and are also indexed rapidly by major search engines.
For PRWeb customers this means more exposure, more traffic, longer visits, and more content sharing (Photbucket users can easily share content to their favorite sites, like myspace, facebook, Xanga, iGoogle, blogger, multiply, etc – via a one-click posting feature).
“Given the wide distribution PRWeb news releases and photos receive, we would strongly recommend that customers only upload photos they are willing to share with their readers.” PRWeb Director of Public Relations Frank Strong told us in a statement. “However, should there be a complaint that someone is using a photo in a release that they should not, PRWeb’s terms of service details that any customer uploading a photo should own rights to a given photo. If we receive a complaint, we reserve the right to pull both the release and photo offline a dispute resolution process for adjudicating any disputes. We’d look at each complaint on a case by case basis,” he added.
Our advice for images used for press releases would be to brand them with a watermark. This serves a double purpose: first it gives your brand more exposure, and second it avoids image theft issues.
The partnership with Photobucket is the latest in PRWeb’s ongoing effort to broaden the industry’s online distribution network. Recent partnerships include Zemanta, MEDesprit and Docstoc.
