Social Media & SEO

If the lines between paid, owned and earned media have become blurred, why is the internal structure at most organizations still so linear? In this commentary, Brooks Thomas, social business advisor with Southwest Airlines, argues for a more integrated approach and provides four tips for smaller organizations looking to bust down the silos between those three types of content.

YouTube videos can sometimes seem like the one-hit wonders of the content universe. But the good news is that through strong SEO strategy and tactical outreach, little-noticed YouTube videos can still be a powerful vehicle for drawing in new audiences. Matt Goldberg, who creates and promotes video content for Chicago-based machine tool manufacturer Lyndex-Nikken—as well as founding production company MBG Films, which boasts 8.5 million views and over 13,000 subscribers—shares 10 recommendations for increasing YouTube views.

Kristy Gillentine spends a lot of time chatting about Snapchat. Host of the popular “ChatSnap—The Twitter Chat All About Snapchat,” Gillentine interviews such social superstars as Shonduras, Brian Fanzo and Madelyn Sklar once a week to share cutting-edge tips and tricks about the platform. But for those brand communicators just looking to establish their presence on Snapchat, she offered the following tips.

In the course of your career, you’ll have attended dozens if not hundreds of industry events where – if you’re like most human attendees – you’ve exchanged business cards as if by rote, refilled your… Continued

Few brands are enjoying more success on social media than Taco Bell. We asked Taco Bell’s social media and brand engagement manager Matt Prince to let us in on some of the secrets and best practices he uses. Rule number one: Know your audience and where it lives. Two: Talk with fans as if they were friends of yours. And drop the jargon, corporate-speak and promotional content.

Your brand launched an Instagram account and built a following, but your engagement and audience growth has plateaued. So, now what? To spark fresh interest in the platform, Noah Champion Buck, executive director of Los Angeles-based Wagstaff Digital, says it’s crucial to pair a data-based approach with ingenuity and experimentation. Buck shared six steps toward crafting more tactical and inventive Instagram content.

Ben Aronson, social media and digital director at Adams & Knight, argues that completion rate is the single metric that you should pay the most attention to, because it is the clearest way to tell how engaged your audience is. After all, if your video gets lots of shares but people are only watching the first few seconds, your message isn’t really getting across. Aronson gives the following tips to power up your completion rates and other metrics.

Usually Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WDC) is a no-brainer, page 1 story. That it’s been relegated to the business section in some sites and newspapers this week is a reflection of the severity of global news… Continued

What can “The Walking Dead” teach us about digital PR? Here, Carmen Collins, a social media manager with Cisco, takes us through four lessons that the zombie hit sensation can teach us about the dizzying highs and terrifying lows of social media, including the importance of building your digital tribe, the need to stay humble and take nothing for granted, and the need to find and use just the right tools.

The influencer bubble is about to burst. So say a rash of communicators who’re tired of paying exorbitant fees for influencers who, they claim, rarely deliver. Still, some brand communicators feel influencers can deliver messages with more authenticity than a brand can. That’s the case with Sara Dunaj, social media manager of Princess Cruises. We asked her to share some best practices.