Business Wire vs. PR Newswire

For a funding announcement or a big product launch, Business Wire is the service to use. For less important announcements, and for clients with limited budget, it might be worth considering other options. PR Newswire and Marketwired are both decent services that provide comparable results, but the high touch quality of Business Wire is pretty unique.

Incentivized

PR Newswire is well suited for organizations with a significant public relations budget that want to quickly disseminate a news release over the wire to a specific targeted group of recipients. It's probably not a suitable solution for smaller companies or "boutique" public relations agency unless the distribution cost is to be directly passed on to the client because it is quite expensive.

Incentivized

• The site has a very specific search function that makes it easy for users to sort through the many press releases put on the site each day, making the process easier/more efficient.
• The "Media & Journalist Tools" tab is helpful for myself and my colleagues, specifically, the RSS feeds to make sure we're staying on top of business happenings.
• I don't use the "How-To" section, though I know folks who have to learn more about writing press releases, and I've heard it's very helpful.

Incentivized

• I think PR Newswire's reach is very good. It's a well-known service that's been around a long time and has a solid reputation. You can trust it.
• I think PR Newswire helps increase the visibility of news. So although I would also recommend pitching the news, using a wire service, particularly when there's major news to announce, can help in spreading the word.
• It's pretty easy to use. You may need someone to walk you through it at first, but you can save distributions and so forth so that it gets easier over time.

Incentivized

• Expensive - distributions cost hundreds to thousands of dollars, with a higher cost for longer releases and additional fees for multimedia content like photos or videos.
• Limited number of media outlets specifically in Florida.

Incentivized

• Pricing could be better especially as it relates to a digital footprint
• The ability to add multiple photos, video links, logos, etc., can be cost prohibitive
• From an earned media relations standpoint, we find that journalists may not cover something once they see it on the newswire

Incentivized

It's the best service we have used. We have tried a competitor and everyone prefers Business Wire.

Incentivized

I gave it this rating because the Business Wire website is very user-friendly. Being able to navigate the platform on my own without technical assistance made it possible for me to quickly and easily submit news release distributions, which can be critical at times, such as during hurricane season when we need to get information out to the news media and our customers quickly.

Incentivized

PR Newswire is an industry leader and gives the user the ability to send out a press release, to a wide audience, very quickly and easily. The pricing is on par with other companies (perhaps they are a bit higher) but they do send useful "visibility" reports after a release is distributed, which is helpful when trying to explain ROI to C suite leaders. You also can email or fax your own distribution list, which is helpful and reduces the need for a media monitoring service

Incentivized

The team members are very quick to respond and do their absolute best to help resolve issues quickly. I also like that I can have one of them proofread my press releases before they are distributed. It always helps to have another set of eyes on the content. There have been a few times that they've caught an error that nobody else did so it's worth the extra couple minutes that it takes!

Incentivized

Honestly this is probably the absolute worst part of the company. I had maybe 5 different emails from 5 different people when attempting to use this service, and I never knew who my account manager was and who the other people were.

Business Wire is very easy to implement. This isn't a requirement, but it's recommended that you begin to set up saved distributions for different clients so that you don't have to start over from scratch. Rather than doing all this work on the front end, you can just do it as you send out your first piece of news for each client.

Incentivized

Cision PRWeb was not good at targeting the major business community and was not fitted well into our demands. The price of Cision was high and very unjustifiable as there were not enough features in it and was not efficient in its working as well. But on the contrary, if I look at Business Wire then I think it is just a perfect match for our business demands.

PR Newswire is considered one of the two gold standard newswire services because of its wide reach and high quality reporting. Pricing is almost identical to its biggest competitor, Business Wire, so it winds up being a matter of preference and ease more than anything. We actually made the decision to move our business away from PR Newswire due to their growing desire to have editorial oversight over the news we're distributing on behalf of clients.

Incentivized

• Staying updated on business news in my team's industry
• Helps my team generate story ideas for our publication, allowing us to do our jobs more efficiently

Incentivized

• ROI is difficult to calculate in my company's specific industry, but we do know our visibility has increased when we send out a release via PR Newswire.
• We send out a relatively small number of press releases a year, so we know when we send out a report if our target audience is receiving it.
• With Google and other search engines being the primary way people research information about company's today, we know that when we do a press release via PR Newswire that release will "live" indefinitely on the web, so we know our press release will go much further than the initial distribution.

Incentivized