Five golden recommendations for social media practices in trade media marketing

How to combine traditional marketing and social media marketing most effectively? The research question is based on the objective to find the best social media practices for trade media marketing to achieve high outreach and visibility for press releases. The purposes of the thesis are assisting professionals in finding modern approaches for trade media marketing, combining social media marketing and trade media marketing, and lastly recommending effective social media practices for trade media marketing. The objectives aim to achieve the most efficient experience and outcome for press releases, as well as drive and increase the successful results on digital platforms for company professionals, who distribute news, and editors, who publish news. The objectives of the thesis are to create a strong and effective co-existence of long well-written press releases in web and print media, combined with its visualized social media version. It aims and targets professionals with a combination of social media marketing and trade media marketing. Also, it aims to boost the presence of press releases on social media to achieve maximum outreach and visibility. The theoretical framework dives into the strong influence of word-of-mouth marketing for press releases and shows how to use it most effectively as an advantage for businesses and organizations based on current literature. Moreover, it defines target groups, shows opportunities, channels, press release composition and challenges. In addition, a glossary with definition of terms is included. The theoretical framework contains the key concepts: social media marketing, social media news releases, differences between SMNR and press releases, the TARES Ethics Model, word-of-mouth marketing and lastly press releases and their purpose. The outcome of the research is based on a qualitative research, which includes the experiences, pain points and opinions of eight highly experienced professionals and business students. To get a valuable insight into the prior experiences of professional in trade media and press releases, the qualitative research was conducted in form of interviews during the end of January and beginning of February 2021. and open conversations according to investigative questions. The interviews focussed on professional background, information retrieval, prior experience with press releases, opportunities of social media practices, and the impact of social media features. Insights into their work experience and pain points are offered, where also direct quotes and tone-of-voice are analysed. Finally, the result of the research is the five golden recommendation for social media practices that are included in the reflection: mobile optimization, the focus on online presence, channel suggestions, the usage of social media features, and word-of-mouth marketing. The overall goal is to evaluate and utilize social media, its platforms, and features, in the most effective way. These recommendations are meant to lead or inspired by professionals who work with press releases. The goal is to achieve maximum visibility and outreach for product news and press releases online based on the research’s outcome and results