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Marketers are trained to watch engagement, track reach, respond to comments and keep an eye out for influencers on social media. But above and beyond how many shares and click throughs a post receives, the question your senior leaders really want to know is, “What’s the ROI of your social media efforts?” If you want more budget, headcount or respect within your organization, then you better have an answer to that question.

Kristy Gillentine spends a lot of time chatting about Snapchat. Host of the popular “ChatSnap—The Twitter Chat All About Snapchat,” Gillentine interviews such social superstars as Shonduras, Brian Fanzo and Madelyn Sklar once a week to share cutting-edge tips and tricks about the platform. But for those brand communicators just looking to establish their presence on Snapchat, she offered the following tips.

In the course of your career, you’ll have attended dozens if not hundreds of industry events where – if you’re like most human attendees – you’ve exchanged business cards as if by rote, refilled your… Continued

As communicators, you know the importance of face-to-face encounters, having a meaningful conversation IRL (in real life). Whether you are attending an industry event to learn, to network or to market your brand, here are the 5 habits of highly effective event-goers.

Few brands are enjoying more success on social media than Taco Bell. We asked Taco Bell’s social media and brand engagement manager Matt Prince to let us in on some of the secrets and best practices he uses. Rule number one: Know your audience and where it lives. Two: Talk with fans as if they were friends of yours. And drop the jargon, corporate-speak and promotional content.

When people came up for air last week long enough to discuss something other than the tribulations of Misters Comey and Trump, a few of them spoke about Apple’s new HomePod. That was our cue to ask communicators if their brands are invested in voice activation. We also wondered if it’s time for communicators to begin making significant investments in voice activation.

Former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony to an open session of the Senate Intelligence Committee June 8 was hotly anticipated, to say the least. It was a true high-stakes test of how Comey would bear up under pressure. Most would agree: The man makes a good impression. If you work with spokespeople who are going to have some major questions thrown at them, the morning’s proceedings contain several lessons. Have your media trainee watch the footage, and give them this advice.

Size matters in some things, but not all. Steph Curry is proving that. As Shonduras said during the sold-out Social Shake-Up Show recently, brands can be successful by deploying micro-influencers who have small but highly engaged followers. Speaking of size, small, media and even large brands are taking to micro-influencers. Here’s how three of them are doing it.

Your brand launched an Instagram account and built a following, but your engagement and audience growth has plateaued. So, now what? To spark fresh interest in the platform, Noah Champion Buck, executive director of Los Angeles-based Wagstaff Digital, says it’s crucial to pair a data-based approach with ingenuity and experimentation. Buck shared six steps toward crafting more tactical and inventive Instagram content.

Ben Aronson, social media and digital director at Adams & Knight, argues that completion rate is the single metric that you should pay the most attention to, because it is the clearest way to tell how engaged your audience is. After all, if your video gets lots of shares but people are only watching the first few seconds, your message isn’t really getting across. Aronson gives the following tips to power up your completion rates and other metrics.