Social Media & SEO

Smart communicators are readying their social media plans for Facebook’s soon-to-come algorithmic shift. At PR News’ Social Media Summit Feb. 22-23 in Huntington Beach, CA, Jacque Marianno, digital strategies director at the American Heart Association and American Stroke Association will touch on the coming changes and discuss how there are still ways to make organic social content work. Marianno sat down with PR News to share how communicators can bolster organic reach and prepare for the changes to come.

In previous editions we presented wrap-ups of the most-engaged B2B and B2C brands ( PRN , January 9 and January 16, 2018). This week we offer a look at the nonprofits whose social posts attracted the most consumer engagement.

The growth curve for Instagram will creep up steadily, powered by growth in developing nations as governments invest in bandwidth and better mobile phone plans are offered, a new report from eMarketer says.

CEOs need to adapt to the times, a new report from Ruder Finn says. The modern CEO needs to be engaged and open to authentic communication, it says, and that includes social media. What the report calls high-performing CEOs are active across social media platforms, but are avoiding posting about current events, progressive issues and politics.

If your Instagram, Twitter or Facebook feed was a constant stream of images and video from the 2018 Women’s March this weekend, you were not alone. On the first anniversary of Trump’s inauguration, women (and men) took to the streets to protest the presidential administration and support fellow sisters at Women’s Marches across the country—and posted to social en masse. Marches were organized in nearly every major U.S. city from New York to Dallas.

Top communicators have pointed to video—where Facebook has made major investments in recent years—as the next best frontier of online advertising. While Facebook Live remains a popular and highly viewed feature for organic content, Facebook Watch seems to be the frontrunner for Facebook’s ad business. Here’s what we know so far about advertising on Watch.

YouTube is trying to manage the tide of the troubling Tide Pod Challenge, deleting posts of users eating the colorful detergent packets, in the latest black eye for the platform. While the trend has prompted Tide’s parent company, Procter & Gamble, to mount a public service campaign, it also underscores YouTube’s challenges in governing its content and addressing advertiser concerns.

Is anyone listening? When it comes to social listening, the answer is yes. The trouble is that nearly 40% of brands lack a formal plan for social listening, according to new survey from PRNews and LexisNexis. Even more concerning is that these brands have failed to implement procedures for what happens when social listening picks up a potential issue.

If you thought Mark Zuckerberg’s New Year’s resolution to “fix” Facebook was just like your resolution to stop eating candy (as in, never going to happen), think again. Late Thursday, Zuckerberg announced major changes coming to the platform—namely, a de-emphasis of branded content in news feeds—and those changes will likely have a serious impact on your brand’s approach to the platform.

2017 could be described as the year of social video, particularly for U.S. B2C brands, as data provided exclusively to PR News by Shareablee demonstrates. It was also a year where brands began to become more mature in their social media choices, posting fewer times but accruing more consumer engagement.