More About Newsjacking
In 2011, David Meerman Scott coined the term ‘newsjacking.’Scott explained it as the act of leveraging breaking news to bring attention to an organization or cause.
So, what is newsjacking’s applicability for brands and businesses in the modern day?
By riding on a news or event’s currency and importance, marketers can draw attention, engagement, and traffic to their brand or product. Apart from establishing the business as a thought leader, this marketing tactic can also help promote the brand’s offerings.
Newsjacking can be a highly effective content marketing strategy when done correctly, especially on social media, due to its large reach. However, it can also play against the business’s interests if the campaign is perceived as insensitive, exploitative, or opportunistic.
Here are a few things a brand or business should consider to pull off newsjacking:
- Relevance: Your content has to be relevant to the trend or news that is breaking to get your target audience’s attention.
- Timeliness: While newsjacking, you must react timely and quickly to a piece of breaking news or a trending topic.
- Creativity: To stand out and grab eyeballs, the brand must put a creative spin, think out-of-the-box, and find intriguing angles to the news or trend relative to the brand.
- Authenticity: The content should align with the company’s values and voice to maintain authenticity and credibility among the audience.
- Engagement: Your content must draw engagement via likes, comments, and shares to enhance your campaign’s visibility on social media.
- Shareability: Newsjacked content has to be share-worthy and easily understandable to meet targets on engagement and reach.
- Flexibility: Brands must be prepared to pivot and adapt to the changing trends and news cycles.
An effective instance of newsjacking was done by ‘Oreo’ during the Super Bowl 2013 when there was a blackout. Oreo tweeted a simple yet striking visual of the product along with the tagline, “You can still dunk in the dark.” Within fifteen minutes of the tweet going live, it recorded thousands of likes and retweets.
