Newsjacking - let the news write for you

On October 4, 2021, flooded with users, Twitter tweeted “hello literally everyone.” 600 thousand retweets and over three million likes followed. Why was everybody hanging around the platform?

Well, Facebook had just suffered a massive outage: Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp were all down. Twitter was the only major networking site you were able to access for a few hours, and they let (literally) everyone know. Gloating, they hogged the limelight just because they were quick to react to what was now breaking news all over the world. And they weren’t the only ones to give their brand a boost that day.

Zion National Park in Utah tweeted “Facebook & Instagram are still down, so we’ll just keep on tweeting” alongside a short video of a bird, well, tweeting. Zion’s post got over 1,700 likes, which was huge for them: their three Valentine’s Day tweets that year had only received a combined 929 likes. Sadly, there are no stats on how many people liked the tweet of the bird. Anyway, all it took was a pun and newsjacking paid off for Utah’s first national park, too.

Newsjacking?!

That’s right, it’s a thing. It works just like hijacking or carjacking, but it’s the news that you take control of. You piggyback on a developing hot news story and the next thing you know everyone’s talking about you, giving your brand quite a bit of exposure. (Props to David Meerman Scott for coining the term.)

Something’s happening all the time in every industry. If you’re not sure what’s going on in yours, browse your social media feed or check some news outlets to find out.

The details may not even matter. Twitter had no clue what had caused the Facebook outage, and I’m sure they didn’t care either. They just needed to get that tweet out before the competition was back online. Because news becomes, er, olds pretty fast.

So, be alert and quick. Turn the spotlight on your brand, adding your own take as you do. Something memorable or fun. The way Zion National Park did.

Coming up with fresh content ideas day in, day out is tough. Every now and again newsjacking can help you out. Your audience will appreciate a fresh approach, and you don’t have to worry about any run-ins with the law.