Social Media & SEO

In just a few weeks, hundreds of social media-savvy professionals will descend upon the W Atlanta-Midtown hotel for The Social Shake-Up Show. And in this personal account, author Chris Strub details three interactions he had at a past Shake-Up—including one with the show’s late founder, Robin Fray Carey—that forever altered the course of his career.

Star Wars is nearly unparalleled as a brand so popular that other brands (whether or not they have a cross-promotional deal) draft in its wake by paying tribute. Thus May 4 is a good day for us to observe how brands are riding the wave, and to see the fruits of some professional content calendars.

Every brand commits social media mistakes, from skimping on audience research to waiting too long to respond to complaints. One gaffe that brands sometimes commit on social: focusing more on generating eye-catching content than on how audiences will likely interact with that content. Monitoring Instagram can be a particular challenge for brands seeking to stay on top of user trends. To help your brand better match its Instagram presence to audience behavior, chew on these five morsels of Instagram wisdom cooked up by protein bar company RXBAR.

Instagram now has over 400 million daily active users, making it the fastest growing social media platform. Given that swelling volume of activity, the marketing opportunities on Instagram abound. Making the most of your brand’s presence on the platform all starts with elevating your feed through such best practices as visual consistency, user-generated content and on-point messaging. Here are three tips to keep in mind.

PR News celebrated some of the year’s best social media campaigns on May 2 at the Yale Club in New York City, as well as the digital leader and social media team of the year. Karen Raskopf, chief communications officer at Dunkin’ Brands, delivered a keynote address on the future of social media and how to create relevant social experiences.

There’s little question that brands, even so-called unglamorous B2B brands that might seem to lack a compelling visual story, are finding Instagram a useful outlet for messaging. That was illustrated in our lead story last… Continued

Many PR pros tend to ignore LinkedIn as a messaging platform for their brands. Shame. LinkedIn said Apr. 24 it has 500 million members. That’s up from August, when it said it had 450 million members. This announcement prompted us to think about how brands can tap into the LinkedIn base with their messages. We asked a brand communicator as well as a LinkedIn executive about best practices for brands trying to build engagement and market services on the platform.

When the mighty Google changes its algorithm, all of PR is pushed in the same direction by the shockwave; here’s hoping that the most recent change will nudge us into a better place. The search engine’s latest move is to demote (but not remove) pages that propagate lies, hoaxes, conspiracy theories and other junk content that more and more is collectively being labeled “fake news.”

Daniella Peting follows one cardinal rule for live streaming: Don’t wing it. Peting, who manages Motorola Solutions’ social media presence in North America and co-leads the company’s Global Social Media Center of Excellence, makes a point of fully preparing every element of a live broadcast from conception to execution.

What enables some customer communities to be financially productive while others remain a cost center? In the research study “The Business Impact of Online Communities,” we found that almost half (49%) of community leaders report revenue gains from their online community. This is an exciting proof-point, but it warranted further investigation. So, we analyzed the data to identify the winning conditions of the top communities and identified three key steps toward a better ROI.