Social Media & SEO

Sand between your tanned toes and the relaxing sound of waves hitting the shore. Happy hour that begins at 4pm (it’s 5’oclock somewhere). Visiting new places. Dealing with crowds (literally, being able to deal with… Continued

You hear it constantly when brand communicators discuss social media, particularly Facebook: “It’s all pay-to-play. Don’t kid yourself.” With that in mind, our Big 4 Social Media Summit next month in San Francisco will include a how-to clinic called “Pay-to-Play—Putting Paid Social to Work to Amplify Your Brand’s Messages.”

It’s happened again. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has upended a major brand for failing to comply with regulations concerning influencers. This time it’s Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Inc. Its online influencers failed “to disclose adequately” that the brand paid them to provide favorable coverage during a late-2014 marketing campaign for video game Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor. The brand settled with the FTC, the agency said July 11.

People watch 100 million hours of video on Facebook each day. If you do a good job of making and promoting video content for Facebook, you could end up with a lot of eyes on your message. But for a lot of communicators, it’s a struggle to make the viewer care, and even to get the video in front of the potential viewer in the first place.

Japanese messaging app Line went public July 14, with the potential to raise $1.14 billion in the largest tech IPO of the year. According to MarketWatch, the company is valued at $7 billion. While the app has the largest following in Asia, its well-publicized IPO in New York today will likely stoke curiosity in U.S. mobile users, and Line’s global potential for brand-to-consumer reach should not be ignored by communicators keeping an eye out for the next Snapchat.

Even though Snapchat lacks many of the brand-friendly features of Facebook and Twitter—native analytics, business profiles, etc.—it’s never been a better time to join the growing community. For cautious communicators, there are plenty of ways to participate in the conversation on Snapchat. At PR News’ Snapchat Boot Camp on July 12 in New York City, speakers offered a variety of case study examples to show how PR can use the burgeoning platform effectively.

Access Intelligence, parent of PR News and other business-to-business media brands, has acquired The Social Shake-Up, a preeminent conference serving marketing, public relations, customer experience, technology and digital strategists. The annual conference and trade show, to be held May 22-24, 2017, in Atlanta, will be produced by PR News in partnership with online destination Social Media Today.

PR News recruited a Snapchat expert, Leslie Douglas, senior social media manager at PwC, for a crash course in Snapchat layout and navigation. At the Snapchat Boot Camp in NYC, she walked the audience through the app’s sometimes-counterintuitive interface. We share a few takeaways from Leslie’s presentation.

It could describe nearly all the data sets we’ve been looking at recently. The 30 most-engaged U.S. brands on a social media platform turned out a bit less content than they had during a quarter the previous year, yet consumer interaction with the content rose. Once again, consumer engagement with mobile video drove that engagement. Filling in the blanks, this week’s Shareablee data, provided exclusively to PR News, examines consumer actions, or engagement, with U.S. B2B brands on Twitter. Actions are defined as the sum of consumer likes and retweets. Brands listed have significant B2B revenue, although some also have B2C businesses. Specifically in Q1 ’16 (Jan 1-March 31), total consumer actions with U.S. B2B brands on Twitter rose 31% compared to the same quarter in 2015. The increase occurred despite a 3% reduction in the number of tweets the brands produced. An increase in consumer engagement with U.S. B2B brands’ videos, up a gargantuan 240%, and more retweets, a 14% rise, fueled the growth in actions.

Just this week, Snapchat added a feature called Memories, which enables users to save their snaps and stories and find them again easily. PR News’ followers on Twitter have been complaining that Memories is just one more step in Snapchat’s transformation into a Facebook wannabe. The ephemeral fun’s gone. For some, it’s time to move on to—what, exactly?