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If your Instagram, Twitter or Facebook feed was a constant stream of images and video from the 2018 Women’s March this weekend, you were not alone. On the first anniversary of Trump’s inauguration, women (and men) took to the streets to protest the presidential administration and support fellow sisters at Women’s Marches across the country—and posted to social en masse. Marches were organized in nearly every major U.S. city from New York to Dallas.

For Carrie Strehlau, turning a complex subject into an engaging story is part of her everyday challenge. Strehlau, a senior social media specialist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, has found Instagram Stories to be a great vehicle for highlighting and humanizing the hospital’s work. In this Q&A, she shares her approach to the platform, how she measures success and why spontaneity can be just as important as prep work when it comes to Instagram Stories.

Did you experience a sudden and sharp sense of FOMO last week? Then you should’ve been in San Francisco with PR News. An all-star lineup of speakers presented on topics ranging from SEO and Google Analytics to influencer marketing and Snapchat at the Big 4 Social Media Conference and Google for Communicators Boot Camp held at the San Francisco Grand Hyatt Aug. 9-10. Here’s a wrap-up of the two-day event, which showcased compelling video, top-notch speakers and networking opportunities galore.

Hershey is embracing employee advocacy programs as a way to pull back the curtain on life at the company, helping to improve recruitment, retention and reputation. The giant chocolatier has devoted an Instagram account (@HersheyCompany) to celebrate its employees, who in turn use the platform to celebrate the company. Here are some examples of successful posts, as well as four tips to keep in mind when crafting your own advocacy program.

When Cisco’s Talent Brand team opened an Instagram account, it didn’t just throw a few photos into the feed, bedazzle them with hashtags and call it a day. The company knew that getting people to show up and remain engaged with the account would be a challenge. So, how did @WeAreCisco’s Instagram account grow from zero to 18,000 followers, with healthy engagement rates, without paying a dime? Here’s how.

Kelly Stone is on a mission to evangelize careers in information technology. As the senior social media manager for CompTIA, a nonprofit trade association for Information Technology professionals, Stone is tasked with softening the IT industry’s image to a younger demographic. And Instagram has emerged as one of her most effective weapons in fighting negative stereotypes. Here are four ways she uses the platform to humanize the industry and her own organization.

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.

Social media exposes many ironies, including the possibility that we are less social because of social media. Remember the days when we used our phone for talking, not typing? And when a friend was someone… Continued

Rarely do I mess with cookies, except to eat them. But an experience over the last two weeks with a furniture retailer had me clearing the cookies from my computer. So annoyed was I by… Continued