What kinds of images work? Courtney Walsh of Media Darling PR^[4] encourages clients to use images that really illustrate that news they’re putting out.

“For example, if it’s a new product, don’t just include a product shot, show customers using it,” says Walsh. “Also remember that images need to be high-resolution to be useful for most press.”

Images can also work double duty in your search strategy if you optimize the images for search by naming and tagging them with keywords.

Becca Bernstein, social media marketing manager at Picaboo^[5], also suggests including the release headline or the related blog post title in the name and tags, so people can find your content through an image search. For example, this approach helped her company get a recent “How to Photograph Fireworks^[6]” blog post to the top of Google’s Image Search.

“When people search for photos of fireworks, my tips and tricks for taking photos of fireworks is now prevalent,” Bernstein says.

Bernstein also recommends adding hashtags and the URL back to the blog post or news release in the Photo Title and Alternate Photo Title.

“When I do this, it allows any image pinned to Pinterest to include a searchable hashtag and a link back to my blog. This drives more clicks and ultimately, a higher ranking on Google,” adds Bernstein.

3. Boost engagement with video. If a picture is worth a thousand words, how much is a video worth? Data from PR Newswire and Crowd Factory shows that while adding a photo to a press release increases engagement by 14 percent, adding a video along with a photo actually doubles the engagement rate^[7].

“Based on my experience, video dramatically increases impressions, interactions and syndication of news releases,” says Jim Kemp, communications manager at software company ColumbiaSoft. “We frequently include video with our news releases whenever possible, and have seen headline impressions regularly increase by 130 percent over releases without videos.”

When creating your video, James Crawford of Crawford PR^[8] suggests that you stick to the news—no self-serving advertorials—and avoid talking heads, to hold viewers’ interest. He also recommends using graphics or charts in the video to illustrate your point, and keeping the video shorter than two minutes.