Local campaigns often ask me how they can get more media exposure and have their press releases picked up, and they’re usually surprised by my first suggestion.
One of the most frustrating things campaigns do that makes it harder for political websites to give them media exposure is they don’t provide correctly sized images.
Worldwide “WordPress,” The Content Management System (CMS), has a market share of 64 or 65% of all sites using a CMS and powers 43% of all websites in 2023.
A content management system (CMS) is the infrastructure or platform of the website that controls everything you see.
Publishing sites as diverse as the NY Times, Fortune, The New Yorker, and Florida Jolt use various versions of WordPress.
When you see a story posted on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, etc., the image you see with the story is called a “featured image.”
The single most popular size for a featured image in WordPress is 1200 x 630 px or 2:1 aspect ratio.
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WordPress will configure that photo size to work on almost any social media platform, whether a desktop or mobile device.
This is a Florida Jolt post from yesterday, and as you can see, the image is good no matter where it’s posted.
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And on and on it goes. The same image is resized automatically and can be used just about anywhere.
There’s an old saying among public relations professionals and politicos “You get great coverage if you do the journalist’s job for them.” There’s some truth to that, but even more true is that you’ll get better coverage if you help make your campaign easier to cover.
No one in publishing has a big staff anymore, and if you’re constantly sending the dreaded iPhone “vertical” photo and that’s all you have on your website, you’ll end up with less coverage than you might otherwise get. Vertical images work inside a post, but they don’t work as a ‘featured image,” and the journalist or the tech/image person must concoct a custom image or get a generic image from a photo service to use your press release since a WordPress post without a featured image is virtually worthless.
Providing a publisher with properly sized images also contributes to a more coordinated and disciplined message since the photo you select should work best with your message. Leave it to the publisher, and the photo used may not have a positive effect on your message. Although the publisher is under no obligation to use the images you provide, they most likely will use what you give them.
A good horizontal image can usually be resized easily by the publisher, but you’d be surprised how many times every single image the campaign has is a vertical shot. Don’t count on your website designer, either. For some reason, they’re the worst culprits of them of all.
When campaigns heat up, news sites get buried with press releases, and many don’t get published. Often it’s because they’re so boring you’d rather gouge your eyes out than read through the whole thing, and you don’t want to inflict it on your readers; putting that aside, you will also get passed over if you never provide a correctly sized image.
It’s summer, and there’s plenty of time to get your images ready for the 2024 campaigns, and now is the time to do it.
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