Social Media & SEO

Hershey is embracing employee advocacy programs as a way to pull back the curtain on life at the company, helping to improve recruitment, retention and reputation. The giant chocolatier has devoted an Instagram account (@HersheyCompany) to celebrate its employees, who in turn use the platform to celebrate the company. Here are some examples of successful posts, as well as four tips to keep in mind when crafting your own advocacy program.

This season, you’ll find your Trending tab awash in bizarre holidays like National Watermelon Day (Aug. 3), National Lazy Day (Aug. 10) and National I LOVE My Feet Day! (Aug. 17). We took a look at three brands in different verticals who saw high engagement around their #NationalWatermelonDay posts, and pinpointed how each contender entered the conversation in a relevant way.

Facebook engineers Jiayi Wen and Shengbo Guo explained in a newsroom post Aug. 2 that an update to News Feed will soon show users more stories that will load quicker on mobile. This will take into account not only the speed of the site itself, but also the users’ network connection at the time they are browsing. Here are 10 tips from Facebook to ensure your site is up to speed.

Instagram had cause to crow Aug. 2: It posted a celebratory blog for the one-year anniversary of Stories. Today it boasts 250 million daily users. A larger proof point for the success of Stories is how Snapchat is faring, and an auspicious date for Instagram coincided with a dismal one for Snap Inc.

Despite what you might think, there were other things going on in the world recently besides the resignation of Anthony Scaramucci as White House communications chief. An example of this was a deal in the social listening space. That got us to thinking about the various ways social listening can help brands, beyond crisis communication and customer service.

It seems that nearly everything Mark Zuckerberg supports grows like a mushroom. Facebook Live is just one example. So why hasn’t your brand begun using it? Fear? Fear not, as Jamie Izaks provides several tips that will help ease your worries as you make an initial foray into Facebook Live streaming.

In the 24 hours following statements made by President Trump and the Department of Justice that could endanger the civil rights of LGBT Americans, the ACLU rapidly established itself as the dominant counterpoint in the media narrative, and deployed successful calls to action from organizing rallies to soliciting followers’ questions and concerns, which were addressed by ACLU lawyers in a live stream that garnered thousands of views and shares.

Humanizing your brand online isn’t always easy, especially if you work in an industry that’s perceived as stuffy and stodgy. But State Farm Insurance is shattering those preconceived notions by using social listening to personalize their brand in unexpected ways. Here, Joe Strupek of State Farm Insurance, who will speak at the upcoming Digital and Marketing Show Oct. 17-19 in Miami, shared some best practices for using social listening on Twitter to delight and engage.

LinkedIn is set to unroll its native video feature in coming months, so now’s a good time to get familiar with LinkedIn video’s upload process and capabilities. Tatiana De Almeida, a PR manager on LinkedIn’s corporate communications team, shared a 3-step guide to help communicators integrate LinkedIn video into their mobile workflow once the feature is rolled out, as well as 4 potential applications of LinkedIn video for communicators to keep in mind.

Facebook IQ, the social media giant’s consumer and advertising insights team, recently made public the results of a survey it commissioned to understand video trends. The study, based on 1,500 respondents aged 18-64 in the U.S. and Canada, offers some insights and takeaways that help communicators understand what their video’s purpose should be on various platforms.