Social Media & SEO

Although Twitter has been perhaps the slowest social platform to adopt Facebook’s pay-to-play publishing model, it’s now zeroing in on the biggest boon it offers brands: its role as a news source. Twitter is testing a new feature, Promoted Trend Spotlight, which would appear on users’ feeds as a banner ad when they navigate to the Explore tab of the app, which aggregates trending news.

A Nicki Minaj critic recently learned the hard way that bullying on social media is now the norm. Brands will increasingly find it harder to engage in this hostile playground without getting bruised. Here are some best practices your social team can use to keep this negativity at a minimum.

Newsjacking, or piggybacking, on a news story or event about another brand to generate publicity for your brand, is a perfectly acceptable practice in PR. Yet it must be done with care and insight. A soy sauce brand managed to do this well on 7-11 Day. Fear not, though, the brand, Kikkoman, was savvy enough to dis the idea of a soy sauce-flavored Slurpee.

Would you rather your audiences use their smartphones to point and click—or point and buy? Given the pressure on communicators to tie their efforts to the bottom line, we’d wager that the latter is preferable for most. And now, if a rumored Snapchat-Amazon integration is any indication, social media audiences will soon be able to point their smartphones at objects in their native environments and purchase those products directly through Amazon.

Twitter has deleted more than 70 million accounts engaging in suspicious and “trolling” behavior throughout May and June, and shows no sign of slowing down in July. This should make the platform more trusted by users and brands, but the effects on its stock price and opportunities for user growth are up in the air.

Facebook’s acquisition of Bloomsbury AI spells big things for communicators as they increasingly rely on automation tools in order to better interface with audiences. But there are two applications of Bloomsbury’s tech in particular that will help Facebook regain its recent lapse in trust with communicators and consumers alike.

During crisis moments, PR professionals tend to focus on how stakeholders and audiences view their brand or client. But of growing concern is what search engines see when a negative news story hits. Whether you’re focusing on crisis proactively or after the fact (and most PR pros would agree you really should be doing both), search engine optimization has a crucial role to play. Here are four ways communicators can learn from Verizon’s SEO practices when it comes to preparing for, monitoring and addressing crises.

Scarlett Johansson’s in hot water for accepting the role of a transgender character in the upcoming film “Rub & Tug.” Critics on social media and elsewhere contend the role should have gone to a transgender actor. The water temperature rose considerably after Johansson issued a curt reply to critics. Traditional PR recommends a more apologetic approach. Will Johansson’s rejoinder work?

Now that Instagram has surpassed its billion-user mark, competition for attention on the platform is heating up. Instagram content must be positioned even more strategically in order to cut through the din.

Casie Shimansky, social media manager at the technology company’s talent recruitment brand @WeAreCisco, notes that Instagram’s growth has her team of two constantly testing their approach to content.

Each month we ask communicators to unload their toolkits and tell us what falls out. In other words, What do you use to do your job? There are few better to talk about Facebook marketing than Ryder Meehan, principal & strategist, Meehan Digital, and a former social marketer at Fossil and Samsung, among others, and James Nickerson, lead instructor, digital marketing at General Assembly.