Social Media & SEO

Our weekly roundup of news items, trends and personnel moves from the past week. This edition highlights Snapchat’s IPO announcement, Volkswagen’s pyrrhic victory and a new book from Marian Salzman.

Smart brands keep their separate channel audiences in mind and develop content with a specific purpose for each channel. One such brand, Boingo Wireless, uses Facebook to repost content that reflects its audience’s interests, Instagram to share behind-the-scenes moments, Twitter to showcase thought leadership and Spotify as a space for users to have fun and blow off steam.

Beyoncé announced on Instagram that she is once again pregnant, a revelation that sent the social media world into a frenzy. The post, a photo of the star posing nearly nude holding her belly, won 6.4 million likes and broke the record for most-liked post on Instagram (the previous record holder was Selena Gomez, with 6.3 million likes). While most PR pros probably can’t claim the nearly 100 million Instagram followers the pop icon boasts, here are a few major takeaways to consider the next time your brand has a big announcement.

For Arby’s, Twitter isn’t just a platform on which to advertise, it’s a chance to delight. The fast-food chain’s evolving Twitter strategy isn’t concerned with promoting its sandwich of the month or the latest addition to its menu. Instead, Arby’s is focused on engaging in conversation, identifying niche areas and most of all, having fun with its followers.

Facebook Live has a lot of advantages for communicators: It is novel enough that people are drawn to the medium per se out of curiosity, Facebook’s algorithm privileges it above other forms of content and the medium prompts engagement probably more than any other. But can you take those advantages and turn them into a winning strategy for capturing audience attention?

In this era of the 24/7 news cycle, Moments, Twitter’s curated collection of tweets and videos, has become a favorite stop for a fast check of the news and celebrity tidbits. But last week it seemed to disappear from mobile screens. It hasn’t. Moments has been moved somewhere less conspicuous. True, that seems like we should be preparing its obituary, but Twitter swears Moments is alive and well. And at least one social media insider says there’s a silver lining in all this for brand communicators.

Our weekly roundup of trends and personnel moves. Featured this week is a story about regulating influencers and involving the Kardashians. In addition the heads of PRSA and The Arthur W. Page Center blast alternative facts and fake news.

When Microsoft rolled out Windows 10, it didn’t expect the deluge of social media conversations that followed. That may seem surprising for a company its size, but the response across the globe was massive. And it displayed the power of social media to force organizations to rethink their social marketing, sales and customer-care strategies.

In the age of social media, employee messages can be very slippery indeed: The harder you squeeze to keep them in your grasp, the more they slip between your fingers and out into the world. Such seems to be the case with President Trump’s orders to the Environmental Protection Agency, National Park Service and the Forest Service to cease all communications with news media and otherwise stop disseminating facts about the climate.

Coming just days after the Women’s March, PR News’ Top Women in PR awards luncheon in NYC was an ebullient event that brought the PR industry together to celebrate female leadership and the individuals who’ve… Continued