Social Media & SEO

Brands, in an effort to get out a shareable tweet or a super-likeable post, are often caught in a daily trap of shallow engagement with its communities. Your stakeholders — humans just like you and… Continued

“Organic is dead.” Whether or not you agree with this statement, social media platforms unquestionably favor sponsored posts over organic posts in followers’ feeds, and it’s now more important than ever to secure a paid social media budget if you want your brand’s posts to rise above the throng. But how can PR professionals make the case for those budget dollars with the C-suite given the ever-present challenge of proving ROI on social media?

Working outside of the limitations of smartphone-captured footage, communicators can now stream professional-quality video directly to Twitter. While smartphone video has its place within Periscope and on platforms like Snapchat, brands now have the ability to widen their approach to streaming.

If you’re a brand communicator, you’re not likely to wade into politically hot waters, but in this incendiary cultural moment any topic can inflame certain groups of people—or the government. The Amy Goodman case in particular demonstrates the increasing power and inherent dangers of live streaming and the seriousness with which government authorities are approaching the medium.

Without Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump appearing in your brand’s YouTube video, and lacking the professionals and budgets of the major broadcast, cable and Spanish-language networks, does your brand’s video stand a chance? Indubitably so, communicators tell us. In this first of this two-part series we’ll concentrate on bolstering your YouTube content; part II, in a future edition, will focus on measurement and analytics.

As the company tries to focus on everything live—from streaming on Periscope to following breaking news and events—savvy users will notice a blending of old and new in the new feature. Explore takes two tools Twitter created for compiling essentially separate conversations and blends them together. Long-time Twitter users will see pieces of the now defunct “Discover” feature—suggested account and trending topics—coexisting alongside Moments’ signature highlights.

Today’s SEO is a complex stew of content, links, site performance, user experience and a bunch of other variables pushed to perform in a wide array of environments. But for all the considerations that go into developing a successful SEO strategy, it’s important to remember that the driving force behind SEO is people. At its core, SEO is just a machine that’s trying to keep up with humans’ search expectations by monitoring and emulating their behaviors. Keywords are one of the ways that search engines do this.

In the new update being rolled out, auto advance is no more. Users will be returned to the story list, unless they use the new story playlist feature, tapping the thumbnail image of each story they want to view and then seeing all of those stories in order.

One nonprofit essentially is like every other nonprofit, except for size and the causes it supports, right? Not really. While less unique than snowflakes and fingerprints, some of the most-engaged nonprofits on Instagram in Q2 took different routes to amass their impressive figures.

With the Snapchat environment in flux, what should communicators do to measure their Snapchat efforts now? A sensible approach is to begin with the basics, Baird says. Set goals from the outset. Are you trying to sell product through Snapchat? Gain exposure for your brand, raise awareness and create buzz? “Your goals will dictate your measurement methods,” she says. Indeed, the communicators we interviewed favored various measurement tactics, including unique views, open rates, story completion rates, screenshots and Snapchat’s own Snapchat score.