The PR writer’s job is not an easy one. With the volume of work our PR writers have it’s sometimes difficult NOT to overuse certain words.
This is sounded out in a recent report by Shift Communications – a big American PR firm. They clearly had some time on their hands and trawled through nearly 80,000 press releases – that’s 16 million words – and identified the top 50 used words in those releases.
Did we learn much? The word ‘business’ was used 10,000 times – which isn’t too surprising. And then there were several words you’d expect to be in a press release, such as ‘market’, ‘new’, ‘research’, ‘press’ and ‘information’. They appeared more than 3000 times.
The word ‘global’ also appeared 3000 times which seems a bit odd to us, and may be more indicative of the searches they used to find that many press releases in the first place.
It gets more interesting as we look at words that cropped up 1000 times. These include classics such as ‘growth’, ‘forward’, ‘standard’, ‘performance’, ‘value’, ‘data’ and ‘solutions’.
Sometimes it’s hard to find a word that’s better than ‘solution’, for example, but we know as writers how it has become overused.
Is there any danger in using such words? From a Google perspective it does tend to water down search results because so many people use these words. And often it’s hard to find good alternatives. If you have a ‘market-leading widget’ what else would you want to call it? If you have conducted ‘research’ using ‘data’ or ‘information’, that’s exactly what happened and it’s hard to put it differently.
We think the key to getting your press release noticed is not the common words you use, but the words that go around them. Words that inspire editors, journalists and reporters to print the release. Words that inspire readers to pick up the phone and call you to do business.
So – it’s an interesting report, but we’ll keep using the words that work and deliver benefit to our clients.