Stories by Seth Arenstein

In our review last week of most-engaged B2C brands for 2017 ( PRN , January 9, 2017), we saw a tremendous surge of consumer engagement, or actions, with video. This week, we’ll see that consumer engagement with social posts from B2B brands were somewhat similar.

2017 could be described as the year of social video, particularly for U.S. B2C brands, as data provided exclusively to PR News by Shareablee demonstrates. It was also a year where brands began to become more mature in their social media choices, posting fewer times but accruing more consumer engagement.

It’s not a surprise that Facebook is the dominant social platform. That was one of the conclusions from the 3rd annual RBC Capital Markets study of 5,000 U.S. Internet users. There were surprises, though. One of them was the satisfaction rates of the various platforms (Facebook could do better here). Another surprise (well, not really) was the dominant showing of Snapchat with children and teens.

One of the holy grails of PR must be the definitive word on Google’s SEO regime. While that might be unattainable we can make educated guesses as to how the search giant ranks articles. Branded3 of the U.K. has issued its list of best guesses as well as a list of things that can be done to a site and its contents to improve searchability ranking.

Many of us believe we know all about activist investors. A pair of investors threw a curveball last weekend, urging that Apple seriously consider warning parents about the dangers of excessive iPhone use for children and teens. Their demands were well crafted and included a bevy of studies and statistics.

You’ll find few people who like ads interrupting their social media experience. Still, content costs and really good content costs even more, so ads are necessary. A new study from university researchers shows far more sites than originally thought are using anti-ad-blocking measures.

As we know, there is a lot of enthusiasm for engaging with influencers on social media. Yet few communicators spend time strategizing about possible risks, says Emma Monks, head of trust & safety at Crisp Thinking.… Continued

It is said there are two sides to every story. Similarly the internet and social media platforms have their pros and cons, although the net’s bad characteristics often receive the dominant share of attention. 2018 might mark a consensus around a new code of conduct for social media as several breaking stories seem to demonstrate.

As the year ends with this edition of PR News , we begin the first of three data installments provided exclusively to us by data partner Shareablee. In this first edition Shareablee provides the most-engaged B2B brands during 11 months of the year with Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Is there anything more dangerous than attempting to predict industry trends? Fortunately we found 17 PR, marketing and communications leaders willing to take the risk of prognosticating for 2018 and sharing lessons learned in 2017. Among the many themes recurring in the predictions are the need for PR to embrace technology, produce better content, speak with authenticity and attempt to create a sense of humanity.