Archive: September 2016

Communicators know Snapchat is a powerful tool for audience engagement, but that means nothing if they’re dealing with a skeptical C-suite. Limited metrics, doubts about the platform’s staying power and a reluctance to stretch lean social media budgets further are just a few of the arguments communicators might encounter when proposing a Snapchat channel launch.

At the risk of sounding obvious, you need to have strong visuals to have a good Instagram presence. This is not something that comes naturally to some brands, especially nonprofits and B2Bs. With a little help from some communicators at the top of their game, however, anyone can put a strategy in place that will make their Instagram feed more engagement-friendly.

Snapchat is known for its informality and immediacy. For communicators seeking to control their brand’s messages, however, those two descriptors could be reasons to stay away from this hot, new tool. Sarah Maloy, director of social media and external video at Fuse Media LLC, the parent of cable music network fuse, has managed to meld (yes, we could have said fuse) Snapchat’s in-the-moment tone with various corporate strictures.

It turns out that one of those right-brain skills—good writing—may be the best SEO weapon available. Now more than ever, SEO success depends on strategic writing skills. Creating content that satisfies search engines’ need to deliver useful information improves Google search rankings.

Mars Inc., owner of the Skittles brand of candy, waited five hours to release a statement in response to a tweet from Donald Trump Jr. that used an image of a bowl of Skittles and the brand name in a political message posted to Twitter. Those five hours were put to good use.

PR pros understand the importance of a great hook in storytelling. But how do you employ such hooks on Snapchat, where you have just one day to get noticed before that crucial opening moment disappears, along with the rest? Melanie Cohn of Dunkin’ Brands says that success lies in crafting an enticing hook that keeps audiences along for the ride, and following through with a matching payoff within the platform’s 24-hour window.

Our job is to develop the visual and verbal brand an organization will use to tell their story, and to write, design and produce the communications that will bring that brand to life. But unless we start with a shared understanding of how brands are built, grown and promulgated, we won’t be as successful as we—and our clients—want to be.

In this weekly feature we ask PR pros to spot trends and discuss how they are reacting to them. In this edition we hear from Stephanie Elsea, VP, communications, Southwest Affiliate, American Heart Association.

With 8 billion average daily video views on Facebook, 4 billion+ on YouTube and one hour of video uploaded to YouTube ever second, the path ahead for brand communicators seems clear: commit to video. But with that much video in the social ecosystem, how can you compete, especially when videos taken during a Beyoncé concert September 10 showing a pre-arranged marriage proposal for her dance captain receive more than 5 million views? We asked PR pros with video expertise and restricted the conversation to brand video on Facebook and YouTube.

Data can be sliced many ways. Below we see consumer actions, or engagement, with U.S. B2B brands on Instagram. Actions grew 159% between Q2 ’15 and Q2 ’16, according to Shareablee data provided exclusively to PR News Pro. The ratio of of Likes to Comments remained exactly the same. Astonishing.