Social Media & SEO

At its Social Media Summit in San Francisco on Aug. 10, PR News will honor Madison Dowswell of PepsiCo, Ashley Frohnert of PETA and Jessica McGlory of Jellyfish as its 2018 Social Media Luminaries. The Social Media Luminaries awards program celebrates of-the-moment social media marketing pioneers.

Most communicators would agree it’s important for audiences to be able to find their press releases in a Google search. But how can they make sure the right audiences and journalists find those releases?

The first step is making the most of your search data, according to Laura Mitchell, director of digital for Cisco.com, who leads SEO for the technology company’s core web property. Mitchell and her team have a proven system for tying search data to desirable outcomes such as having target readers find releases and other timely content.

Musk’s latest Twitter gaffe should remind communicators that messaging from your leadership is often the most prominent and front-facing indicator of your brand’s values. As the head of a major brand, Musk’s inflammatory style may be alienating potential Tesla customers and damaging the brand in the long term. Here are a couple of lessons brands can learn from steering clear of Musk’s tactics.

Although Twitter has been perhaps the slowest social platform to adopt Facebook’s pay-to-play publishing model, it’s now zeroing in on the biggest boon it offers brands: its role as a news source. Twitter is testing a new feature, Promoted Trend Spotlight, which would appear on users’ feeds as a banner ad when they navigate to the Explore tab of the app, which aggregates trending news.

A Nicki Minaj critic recently learned the hard way that bullying on social media is now the norm. Brands will increasingly find it harder to engage in this hostile playground without getting bruised. Here are some best practices your social team can use to keep this negativity at a minimum.

Newsjacking, or piggybacking, on a news story or event about another brand to generate publicity for your brand, is a perfectly acceptable practice in PR. Yet it must be done with care and insight. A soy sauce brand managed to do this well on 7-11 Day. Fear not, though, the brand, Kikkoman, was savvy enough to dis the idea of a soy sauce-flavored Slurpee.

Would you rather your audiences use their smartphones to point and click—or point and buy? Given the pressure on communicators to tie their efforts to the bottom line, we’d wager that the latter is preferable for most. And now, if a rumored Snapchat-Amazon integration is any indication, social media audiences will soon be able to point their smartphones at objects in their native environments and purchase those products directly through Amazon.

Twitter has deleted more than 70 million accounts engaging in suspicious and “trolling” behavior throughout May and June, and shows no sign of slowing down in July. This should make the platform more trusted by users and brands, but the effects on its stock price and opportunities for user growth are up in the air.

Facebook’s acquisition of Bloomsbury AI spells big things for communicators as they increasingly rely on automation tools in order to better interface with audiences. But there are two applications of Bloomsbury’s tech in particular that will help Facebook regain its recent lapse in trust with communicators and consumers alike.

During crisis moments, PR professionals tend to focus on how stakeholders and audiences view their brand or client. But of growing concern is what search engines see when a negative news story hits. Whether you’re focusing on crisis proactively or after the fact (and most PR pros would agree you really should be doing both), search engine optimization has a crucial role to play. Here are four ways communicators can learn from Verizon’s SEO practices when it comes to preparing for, monitoring and addressing crises.