Social Media & SEO

Instagram isn’t just for companies with visually appealing products. Every brand—even B2B, nonprofits and associations—can use this optically intense platform. It’s an established fact that visual storytelling yields the highest rate of engagement, and there’s no better place to do it than Instagram. These tips can help you shift some of your brand communications away from text and toward visuals.

As tech companies continue to invest in bot technology, automation is on the road to becoming the default way customers interact with businesses in a variety of different ways. Facebook announced that the company is set to begin a broad implementation of bots into its already incredibly popular Messenger app. With its access to more than 900 million users and 50 million businesses already on the platform, Facebook’s move could be seen as the most viable shift to bring bot technology into the communications mainstream.

Jumping on trending hashtags is something that brands should take very seriously. We’ve all seen brands haphazardly insert themselves into a trending topic only to go down in flames moments later. At times, social media is serious business and it pays to keep a close eye on the conversations happening online. But at other times, like today’s #NationalGrilledCheeseDay, jumping on trends is relatively safe and can add some fun to your branded communications.

Very much in the Facebook style of rollouts, some brands had been provided the additional 45 seconds months earlier, allowing them to preview their Super Bowl ads on the platform and compete for television’s ad dollars. Although video might seem an afterthought on photo-dominated Instagram, Shareablee data, provided exclusively to PR News, argues otherwise.

If you’re in charge of a brand Twitter account, the idea of using emojis has probably been floated, and probably at least one person in the room has grimaced. Sure, people use them constantly and you want to be in touch with them, but coming from a brand, emojis can seem desperately phony (see headline for verbal equivalent). But there are brands that pull it off quite well.

Snapchat just got called up to the big leagues. The unlikely social media superstar has been on the rise for a while now, but this update shows the company is ready to acquire a larger share of the market and become one of the major players in social media. With its newest update, the company added an incredible amount of depth to its messaging offerings. By launching Chat 2.0, the company developed a social experience that looks to keep users on the platform as long as possible.

Governments and world leaders are increasing their presence on social media. And like brands, some are committed to it, while others use a Facebook page as a placeholder, posting mundane announcements or no content at all. Indeed many of the trends brands have observed on social are apparent with the social accounts of world governments and leaders.

Sometimes it’s best to let your audience speak for itself. Brands can get bogged down in trying to develop messaging that aligns with their targets or speaks in a similar voice. Often brands need to step back and stop speaking to their customers, and instead offer them a place to share their unique voices. With this in mind, Taco Bell Foundation and Edelman used two specific tactics to galvanize their audiences around the fight to lower high school dropout rates.

PR pros no longer have to try and stuff their messages into a confining 15-second window. With its decision to sort posts in a user’s feed algorithmically instead of showing them in reverse chronological order, the extension of Instagram’s video limit will give communicators more room to create content that users are sure to engage with, which will help brands secure a top spot in users’ feeds.

As a PR pro your job is to garner attention for a client or brand. A well-executed Instagram contest can be a great tactic to achieve increased visibility.