Since I am on vacation, I have a great guest post for you today 
Enjoy!
One of the biggest challenges for someone like me that’s in the social media marketing world is to staying ahead of current social news and updates online.
If you’re new to blogging, then you’re probably scratching your head, saying to yourself, “What’s news-jacking?”
What NewsJacking Is
Newsjacking is simply jumping on the bandwagon of a breaking news report about something right as it becomes published from the source. In other words, you’re not the one breaking the story, but you can still benefit from the traffic and the searches because you caught it just at the right time of when it actually broke to the public.
As you can see in the image above, the news story breaks and you are lucky enough to be involved in being one of the first few hundred people that catch it. You write your post, place your affiliate link (if it requires one), and by the time you have finished that the story has already peaked and it is now getting millions of searches.
Newsjacking is actually used by a lot of people to build excellent traffic to their sites right away because breaking news is happening all the time online.
The Importance of NewsJacking
One of the biggest challenges for businesses who want to use content marketing to communicate is finding ideas and sources for new content topics. Since most of your blog topics should not be talking about your specific products or services, what do you talk about?
This is where newsjacking comes in handy.
The general idea is that you search a trending story on a social site and then choose to write about it. You can simply use the “Trends” to share these updates with your audience by linking back to a post that you have written that is relevant about the trend you are talking about, but it’s even better if you take a rising trend and write a great blog post around it because when you add your own perspective to that particular trend it’s going to help get more targeted clicks and leads from the story and will be specifically tailored for that topic.
Finding Social Trends To NewsJack
Whether you are a member of Google Plus or Twitter, then you can use these platforms to find the trends that people are searching at that moment.
Trends are usually displayed in your home profile on that specific social account. They are going to be the words that start with the hashtags (#).
Trending today on Google Plus
- #AskAstro
- Justin Timberlake
- #ApopShinee
- #Oscars
Catering to the trend searchers:
Once you have decided to either write the blog post, or simply share an existing blog post for your newly “jacked” news story, it’s time to share!
Make sure you include a brief description with keywords in your update, and don’t forget to include the news word you are jacking.
For example: If I’m news jacking the #AskAstro story from the trends above I would include this same hashtag in my update!
Your Turn
Have you ever heard of newsjacking on social media? If so, tell us the different strategies that you have used to drive traffic from it to your site! What are some of the trends that have worked for you?
Wade Harman
BloggersMakeMoney.Com
I have never heard about newsjacking on any social media before. I just know it from you today. Thank you very much for sharing this precious information. This must be useful for me. I will learn it and do it after I understand it.
Heru Prasetyono recently posted..25K Firesale
Good to hear that I helped you Heru! This has actually given me an idea to write on my own blog that will be coming out soon!
Wade@Social Media Marketing recently posted..It’s A Long Way To The Top, If You Wanna Rock n Roll In Social Media!
Julie, I like using Google alerts, as well as Google trends. Alexa for what’s hot on the net is good too. They are all updated continously. It’s harder today to stay on top of it all as things are changing more rapidly than ever before. I had heard that phrase only once before “newsjacking”.
Lisa recently posted..eBook Rough and High Waves to Completion
Huh! I have never thought of this, such a great idea!
Kathryn recently posted..Divorce-Proofing Your Marriage: Notes From my Church’s Marriage Conference
It IS a great idea, however, only if you have a relative story that coincides with the trend.
Wade@Social Media Marketing recently posted..How To Manage Your Social Media Updates More Efficiently
Thank you for using my newsjacking graphic, but I wish you had given me proper credit since my book “Newsjacking” started the newsjacking phenomenon.
What changed recently to allow Newsjacking is that Google now indexes in real-time. That allow a timely blog post to be seen by journalists as they search for more information on a topic. Real-time is the key here. Yet nearly all marketing and PR people are in campaign mode rather than real-time mode, so those like us who understand newsjacking have an advantage.