Social Media & SEO

For years, podcasting was overshadowed by other forms of emerging media, but its momentum continues to grow. More than 10 billion podcasts were downloaded and streamed on Apple devices alone in 2016, an increase of more than 2 billion from the year before. And every week, new brands jump into the space, using podcasts as a form of content marketing, a dynamic way to attract new customers. But for brands looking to build an audience, the key is to focus on content first and marketing second.

Google’s AdWords can be an expensive proposition, particularly for nonprofits. The brand’s Ad Grants can help, providing AdWords for free, with several restrictions. Here is a step-by-step account of how qualifying nonprofits can take advantage of this excellent program.

Many brands have added Facebook Live to their social media arsenals to give audiences a behind-the-scenes look at trade shows and events. But with live video, haste commonly creates waste. In pursuit of an insider experience one can easily disregard the time and preparation needed to ensure a live stream leaves a good impression.

So you’re writing keyword-rich copy in the inverted pyramid style, including backlinks and making sure all your pages have unique and clear titles? That’s great, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to maximizing SEO potential. At the 2017 Social Shake-Up, Carolyn Shelby, SEO director at tronc, Inc., took the audience to school on all of the above, plus more key areas where communications pros have a blind spot.

When I ask my friends in PR what they’d do with a bigger budget, their first instinct is to smile that “yeah, right!” smile. It’s hard enough to keep the budget they have much less… Continued

If you followed this year’s sold-out Social Shake-Up Show online, you know the FOMO-inspiring tweets and posts were flying fast and furious. Here are a curated set of six tweets from the event—from attendee Kelly Stone, social media manager from CompTIA—showcasing some of her key takeaways, including the need to produce influencer guidelines, the value of vulnerability and why you should always put your followers first.

Gone are the days when merely producing a Facebook Live broadcast was enough to give your brand an automatic algorithm boost. The promotion leading up to and following a Facebook Live broadcast is as crucial as the quality of the stream itself for winning and retaining viewers, according to Tracey Edouard, social media producer at Mashable and host of Mashable’s #BizChats Facebook Live series.

Paid social just got a little easier on our favorite ephemeral social network. Snapchat announced that users can now design Custom Geofilters within the app via an easy-to-use interface. Just open the Settings menu, tap On-Demand Geofilters and you’ll be able to select from a list of occasions, such as Graduation, Wedding and Birthdays. Then you can choose from a number of templates and edit them with the same text, Bitmoji and sticker tools that you use on snaps.

Snapchat introduced a new tracking feature called Snap Map last week, allowing users to share their location as well as see where their friends are and, in some cases, what they’re doing. While the new tool has raised some privacy concerns, it also has some implications for brand communicators— it could become a great tool for event-based promotion and local businesses, says Andrea Limas, social media strategist for the University of San Francisco, and Kristy Gillentine, vice president of public engagement at Drive West Communications.

Many social media teams lament that they don’t have enough budget, headcount or support to have a real impact on the business. Yet it’s often these same teams that fail to connect the dots. Your senior leaders don’t care about likes and retweets, they care about impact on business results. Here’s a four-step process on how to frame the discussion and speak their language to get more headcount and budget for social.