Stories by Missy Voronyak and Katie Schutrop

Everywhere we look we hear about influencers. YouTubers, Instagrammers, bloggers and more are building online communities. Working with influencers is not as simple as merely finding someone to write about your brand, however. In this article we provide tips to help you find influencers who will be the right fit for your brand.

The authenticity of vulnerability is often ignored by brands, because PR and marketing professionals deem it as repeating the negative. But a company that only shows itself in a perfect light creates a house of cards that can amplify crises when something goes wrong; misrepresentation has a viral quality to it. Does this mean we should only talk about our shortcomings? Of course not. But instead of choosing to avoid vulnerability, here are four ways of using it to make your narrative stronger.

Your organization finally has taken the plunge into podcasting. You’ve chosen a host, show title and theme music—you have the right equipment, too. Congratulations, but you’ve only just begun. If you expect to release a podcast weekly, biweekly or monthly, where can you find content on a regular basis? Think like a journalist and use your eyes and ears with the following three possibilities.

What is an influencer? The definition varies depending on who’s speaking. There’s no denying, though, how important they’ve become for some brands. As such, we’ve asked Shareablee to track influencers with the most consumer engagement. Our first sectors are automotive and beauty.

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.

If you followed this year’s sold-out Social Shake-Up Show online, you know the FOMO-inspiring tweets and posts were flying fast and furious. Here are a curated set of six tweets from the event—from attendee Kelly Stone, social media manager from CompTIA—showcasing some of her key takeaways, including the need to produce influencer guidelines, the value of vulnerability and why you should always put your followers first.

Many social media teams lament that they don’t have enough budget, headcount or support to have a real impact on the business. Yet it’s often these same teams that fail to connect the dots. Your senior leaders don’t care about likes and retweets, they care about impact on business results. Here’s a four-step process on how to frame the discussion and speak their language to get more headcount and budget for social.

An online newsroom is a crucial part of a successful PR strategy. But how can you optimize your newsroom to its full potential? It all boils down to five essential elements—accessibility, easy navigation, shareability, aesthetics and engagement—governed by one overarching principle: Your newsroom should always focus on the person you’re trying to communicate with.

For the past decade, people have argued about where social media should sit in a company’s organization chart. But ultimately, there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach—social media’s location should be a direct reflection of a business’s core priorities. For some organizations, social media is best seen as an extension of customer service, while for others, it may make more sense to locate it within marketing or communications. Here’s why.

For many businesses, leads and sales are primary KPIs. But before you can track sales, you have to generate them—and standing out from the crowd on social media is no easy task. Online consumers can anticipate when ads are coming and know when and how to skip them. Fortunately, major platforms, including Facebook, Snapchat and Pinterest, continue to develop new technologies to help generate and track sales, helping to prove the ROI of social media ads.