After 10 years in the world of PR, we like to think we know what makes a great press release – not because of our own ideas of what makes a good story, but because of what our thousands of clients with their hundreds of thousands of press releases have proved to work.

Here are the top four things you can learn to do right now to get your news noticed, tap into social and build your brand legacy.

1. How to write a great headline ❣️

2. What assets to include 🍑

3. How to get extra eyes on your story 👀

4. How to sweeten the deal 🍦

A bonus #5 step? Watch our interview with journalists Holly and Kelsey as they explain how they love – and hate – to be pitched.

The headline is the first thing a journalist sees and it has one job: get them to read more. Make it good, or they may not read any further.

First off, determine who your audience is, who your competitors are, the current state of your market and what you're doing that's different. Then use that information to tell me why I should care about your news. (Spoiler: if you have to explain it, it's too convoluted.)

Some things you can do to make a great headline:

• Write it as if it were a headline and ask yourself, "Would I read this?"

• Ask "Why should anyone care?" until you have a solid answer

• Tailor the headline to your audience

• Entice the imagination and surprise the reader

• Play with your grammar (punctuation, active vs passive voice...)

And it doesn't hurt to add some personality to it, a bit of flare. Do you think Han Solo makes generations swoon because his scripted lines are all factually correct? Of course not. It's all down to entertainment and bravado, timing and charm. (Ok, it might also have something to do with Harrison Ford's face, but we can't all have Harrison Ford's face marketing our products, so it's best not to fantasize.)

Other things that catch the eye are surprising statements (!), startling statistics (!!) and celebrity namedrops (just make sure it's someone your audience will have heard of).

So while we can't all be Han, we can take an extra 15 minutes to brainstorm a few creative alternatives to the standard "Company X releases Product Y" one-liner snoozefest before hitting "send". You scoundrel.

Embed quotes and tweets

Got a relevant tweet? Great – embed it. Someone raved about your business on YouTube? Stick it in. Got your latest product shot raking in likes on Instagram? In it goes.

Remember, your job is to make it as simple as possible for other people to tell your story.

By embedding evidence journalists can use you are saving them time while adding context and colour to your narrative.

If you use a specialized campaign client, the interface will often have an option to introduce html into the body of your story, making it possible to embed supported content, which varies from provider to provider but should include support for things like tweets and YouTube videos. (We simplified it a bit in Prezly so you can just copy-paste the URL of whatever you want to embed and the system does it automatically for you.) Worst case scenario, even with plain text you will be able to copy in a link.

Make your news social media friendly

Images and videos become extra powerful when it comes to sharing your press release on social media, since social networks will automatically generate a preview based on the content embedded within your press release. Having an attention-grabbing, vibrant image front and centre in your story is an easy way to increase your chances of engagement.

If you want to go a step further and optimize your images for use on social media platforms, there are a few more things you can do.

Include images in different resolutions and sizes

While these differ across platforms and you could spend several days cropping images to all the suggested sizes (overeager sharers might find this social media cheatsheet useful), it's generally a good idea to include:

• A landscape image (around 1200 x 628 pixels)

• A square image (1080 x 1080 pixels; think Instagram)

• If you're operating in food or creative industries – interior design, cosmetics, fashion, DIY, kid-friendly projects, crafts and hobbies – it's a good idea to include a long portrait image for easy sharing on Pinterest (236 pixels wide)

Prezly gives you total control on how you use images and other media to tell your story, giving you the tools to easily move, crop and resize your content right in the story editor.

As in, set up a newsroom for your brand or project and use it to house your backlog of news, contacts and media assets. You can do this in myriad different ways, whatever your budget, from dedicating a part of your normal site to news updates, to setting up a free blog account through Wordpress or Wix, to using a dedicated piece of newsroom software. (You'll forgive us for being biased towards that last option, since customisable newsrooms come as standard with Prezly subscriptions.)

Having a newsroom gives you the power to control at least some of the narrative around your brand, establishes a history for your venture and gives people – journalists, bloggers and customers alike – a source of truth for your business. This is incredibly important at a time when most of what people read about your enterprise comes from third-party sources like social media posts and review sites.

Put simply, your newsroom is your brand's legacy online. But there are other benefits to hosting your press releases on a live site versus shooting them out via discrete email campaigns.

It's also a good idea to include a link to some further assets relevant to your news, company or product in every press release campaign you send out – in other words, to the media centre of your newsroom. After all, is there anything worse than opening up that big piece of coverage you've been anticipating all week only to find they published your CEO's 2016 Facebook profile pic? Nobody wants that.

Far better is to remove any potential for miscommunication by linking every press release to your media centre, which at the very minimum should include:

🌓 Light and dark versions of your logo – transparent background, .png or .svg file type; nothing smaller than 200 pixels across and strictly no .jpgs

💁‍♀️ High-resolution, professional photos of your management team – including anyone likely to be featured in news coverage (original photograph files are best as these will be of the highest quality; this is particularly important when targeting print publications, which are unlikely to accept images less than 2000 pixels wide and 300 dpi resolution)

👕 High-resolution product shots – this is also a nice opportunity to get a shot of your logo in action, on your office wall, a t-shirt, your product – something a bit more interesting that adds context to your brand

🎥 Videos if at all possible – cut these into soundbites and social-media-friendly lengths (that means 30 seconds max) and close the shot with a call-to-action or url

Remember, your aim here is to arm journalists, bloggers and influencers with the resources they need to present your news in the best possible light.

While some mass content creators will be happy to copy-paste your press release into a fresh post and call it a job well done, professional journalists and bloggers will want to tell a unique story with your input, and it's this latter group that is invaluable to your brand identity. (You can reach the former audience through bought media lists and newswires, and while this sort of straightforward coverage is still a win, it results in a lot of replicated content that readers may be less inclined to trust.)

One way to sweeten the deal for any journalists giving your story the side-eye is to offer them something unique – a piece of information no one else knows, exclusive product shots, an interview with whoever's involved. Something that will help them make their story different from the next site over.

Scroll down for a whole load of lovely press release examples that do it right. But first, treat yourself to our free guide on pitching.