3 reasons your boilerplate should be shorter

The authors claim it should be 100 words or less. Do you agree with this assessment?

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Somewhere in a press release we have already stated what the company does—no sense in repeating it. It seems more logical to have one or two sentences, the website, Twitter, Facebook, and other contact info; 400 words is too many for a news release, let alone the boilerplate.

Let’s keep it to 100 words or less, best under 50 words. Here are a few reasons why:

1. It costs less. Business Wire charges a flat rate for the first 400 words and an additional fee for every 100 words after that. Long boilerplates add useless words to the total count and the cost of the release spirals up.

2. It’s what journalists want. Cision’s study, “How the Press Uses and Values Public Relations and Other Media Resources,” confirmed that journalists want a small boilerplate—they don’t have time to read gobbledygook.

3. It looks too corporate. The Bad Pitch Blog focused on the company boilerplate. The authors say that the boilerplate looks less like a concise, substantive description of the company and more like a piece of copy that emerged from a gauntlet of approvals by people focused more on specific words than overall meaning.

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