Social Media & SEO

Instagram has announced it would be adding the option for “select” brands to allow customers to shop via special tags on Instagram Stories. And, after piloting the feature for several months to its test group, the tap-to-buy option has been made available for all business accounts approved for Shopping. The feature is likely to pay off for brands on the platform. In March, the company published data from a survey stating that more than one in three daily Instagram users say they have become more interested in a brand after seeing it on Instagram Stories.

All recent accusations of bias have one thing in common, the same thing that Facebook has dodged questions of reform or regulation over and generally failed to directly address: its proprietary, micro-targeting ad platform. It was this ad platform that allowed the Russians to pay for propaganda in rubles, it was this ad platform that allowed Cambridge Analytica to manipulate its third-party audience categories, and it was this ad platform that has brought the latest accusations of gender bias back to Facebook.

The New Yorker has published a 14,000-word profile on Facebook founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg. While regulation continues to be proposed as the umbrella solution to several of Facebook’s problems this year, here are a few takeaways from the story on what Zuckerberg thinks about external regulation—and what efforts the platform is taking to regulate itself.

PR pros aren’t sweating the congressional scrutiny of social media and the push for new regulations, with some seeing the changes as beneficial to an industry that has long operated in opacity. The hearings last week saw Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey testify on Capitol Hill. More regulation—both by the platforms themselves and external agencies—is likely to result. But this is not raising alarm among communicators.

Twitter has finally banned conspiracy theorist and Infowars host Alex Jones from the platform, citing violations of its abusive behavior policy. While this may seem like a step in the right direction for the social media site, which has been criticized over the past month for allowing Jones to remain active on Twitter despite evidence of previous policy violations, there are still questions surrounding whether this was just the platform bending to public pressure and how the policies actually deal with hate speech and will do so going forward.

Americans’ relationship with Facebook: it’s complicated. Six months after the revelations surrounding the illegal harvesting of user data to manipulate public opinion ahead of the 2016 presidential election, peoples’ trust in social media still suffers and companies and individuals have changed their online behavior in response to it.

A few years ago it seemed breaking down silos between sales and marketing was one of the hot topics in PR. In a way, reducing silos also can be used to build an SEO team, as Randy Hui of the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network argues. But don’t forget the importance of education, he adds.

Snapchat’s foray into ecommerce has proved to be very successful, as shown by its most recent campaign with Adidas. The two companies collaborated on the new Snapchat show “Fashion 5 Ways,” which was used to market a pre-release of Adidas’ new Falcon W shoe on Aug. 21. While watching the show, users were able to swipe up and buy the shoe directly in the app, with ecommerce company Shopify powering the shopping experience. The shoes sold out in six hours. Here are some best practices from the campaign.

Earlier this week, President Trump accused Google and Facebook of prioritizing unfavorable coverage about him in their respective news feeds. The accusation comes at a time when both platforms are under increasing pressure to be more transparent about how they decide what content to prioritize.

There’s far too much depending on the strength of your SEO figures to ignore the importance of improving your page speed, optimizing title tags and meta descriptions and having web analytics in place from day one, argues Julien Brandt, CEO of Organik SEO.