Social Media & SEO

Instagram caused an uproar this week when it unintentionally released a glimpse of a potential update to feeds on the platform. On the morning of Dec. 27, some users found that their Instagram interface had shifted from its usual vertical layout to a horizontal one, in which users had to tap or swipe through one post at a time to get to the next—similar to the Stories feature. Rather than scrolling quickly through posts and ads that weren’t of interest, users had to interact with every post in one way or another.

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.

As 2018 dwindles to a few days, marketers prepare for the new year and many tend to wipe the slate clean. This makes it a great time to consider your budget plans for 2019. To get you started on thinking about marketing priorities, 5WPR chief Ronn Torossian looks at trends he believes will be important to consider in the coming year.

At some point, perhaps soon, companies will use AI to gather data about target audiences and even create content that best suits their needs. Until that time, it falls to communicators and marketers to use available data to paint a portrait of target audiences and how they prefer to receive content. This infographic provides basic profiles of various demographic units and their content preferences.

“Our decision to return the donation to Facebook and logging out of the platform for a week is part of a strategy to bring attention to Facebook ‘s failures in protecting the integrity of both our privacy and our vote,” NAACP’s Aba Blankson told PR News.

Although many brands have already made the shift to marketing and communicating on LinkedIn, some may be hesitant to jump into building a presence on LinkedIn because of preconceived notions about the platform and what kind of content it should contain. The good news is, a lot of those notions are likely wrong and should no longer hold you back.

Instagram announced that users can now send voices messages via the Direct messaging platform in the app. Audio messages can be up to one minute long and can be sent in private and group chats. A second announcement revealed Instagram’s beta testing of creator accounts for influencers, which will “give the app’s high-profile individuals specialized tools.”

Social video may be the preferred form of content for digital natives, but that doesn’t mean it comes cheap. From hiring a freelance video crew, to pre- and post-production costs and boosting the content on social media once it’s finished, even a minute-long video can give senior leaders sticker shock. So how best to convince your management that great video content is what your brand needs to make its next campaign succeed?

The future appears bright for PR as advertising will cede its authority, a panel of veteran PR executives says. Yet PR pros must be prepared to grab the mantle, bolstering their knowledge and use of technology and working strategically. In addition, communicators must continue to build relationships with clients.

It’s easy to forget that social media is a relatively new phenomenon now that it’s so deeply ingrained in our lives. But even as it has grown and evolved over the past decade or so, the rule book for social platforms is still being formed day by day. And it’s remarkably easy for companies, leaders and individuals to screw up what could have been a perfectly normal tweet. As proven by Rudy Giuliani’s recent Twitter grammatical error that unintentionally linked to a domain that was then used by a comedian for a political prank, the book of best practices on Twitter could still use some tweaking.