Stories by Jamie Izaks, All Points Public Relations

The holiday season is a perfect time to enhance the tactics your brand is using on social media. Add storytelling elements, concentrate on visual content and create a consistent theme for your posts, writes Jamie Izaks of All Points Public Relations. Tell followers how your brand can help them during the busy holiday season. And don’t forget to include a CTA.

It seems that nearly everything Mark Zuckerberg supports grows like a mushroom. Facebook Live is just one example. So why hasn’t your brand begun using it? Fear? Fear not, as Jamie Izaks provides several tips that will help ease your worries as you make an initial foray into Facebook Live streaming.

PR pros often hear the phrase, “Think like a journalist.” Sometimes they even need to work as journalists, particularly when they are interviewing brand executives or clients in search of an interesting item that can eventually be pitched to a reporter. It’s your job to move beyond the collection of facts and dry, memorized answers executives often provide. Here are tips to get interviewees to offer emotion and other insights so that the result will be an interesting story. After that you’ll be ready to pitch it to journalists.

It’s nearly the end of graduation season. What this means, of course, is that graduates will be looking for jobs. It’s estimated that there will be 1.1 million undergraduate degrees granted this year. Nearly 10% of those graduates majored in communications and journalism. Do the math. The competition for good-paying positions will be stiff. In truth, that’s usually the case. Here are 6 tips from a veteran of the PR and journalism wars that can help you get where you want to go.

Instagram and Snapchat feature Stories, which gives users the ability to post (and view) ephemeral photos or videos that can be viewed for up to 24 hours. This is a fairly recent for Instagram—it took hold in fall 2016. Fast forward a few months, and users and brands have had time to play with both apps, gauging which (if either) is a useful tool to reach fans and customers. With two strikingly similar options, which is best for your brand?

Statistics point to social selling as one of the most effective tools in sales and marketing. Nearly 75% of buyers consult social media before making a purchase decision, and 77% of buyers don’t talk to a salesperson until performing independent research. Here are four ways to master B2B social selling for your brand.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a social media graphic is worth 40 times that—research shows that visual content is up to 40 times more likely to be shared on social media over other types of content. With some prior strategic planning, strong visual content can become a regular part of your brand’s social media footprint, which will help cultivate an integrated brand voice that will more deeply connect with customers and clients alike.

Developing a unique writing voice can be a challenge. Add in the fact that many PR pros work at agencies where they have multiple clients across different industries and you’re likely facing the dilemma of pinpointing and utilizing many different voices. Here are some tips for identifying your client’s brand voice for better, more efficient written material.

Writing—and the rules associated with it—is, without a doubt, one of the most-argued-about tasks for any public relations professional. Between obeying basic grammar expectations, observing the rules of AP style and adapting it all for individual client preferences, writing press releases and other material can be a bit confusing. Some rules should always be followed. Here are a few that can (and often, should) be broken.

There are several brands that have stood apart from the pack and created a cult-like following: millennial consumers who are rabid for new products, a brand experience to call their own and the status or lifestyle that the brand commands. These brands all have one thing in common: an outstanding social media presence that conveys to consumers an attractive brand lifestyle.