Social Media

It’s still tough for some American communicators to tell just what all of this means for us, at least until we start to see some consequences from GDPR’s enforcement. Those consequences will arrive by end of year in the form of sanctions, though, according to European Data Protection Supervisor Giovanni Buttarelli.

Google has announced it will be shutting down its seven-year-old social network Google+ for consumers. And while those that swear by Instagram and Snapchat are unlikely to miss the struggling platform, Google+ did get a few things right in terms of communications offerings. Here are three Google+ features that communicators might miss—and some suggestions on how to find those offerings elsewhere.

It was temporary relief that Facebook’s largest data breach to date occurred in the midst of non-stop coverage of the Judge Brett Kavanaugh brouhaha. Still, the incident and a story in The Washington Post point to serious issues for Facebook as it attempts to monitor its gargantuan site.

Fashion e-commerce site Revolve filed an IPO this week. The site, which describes itself in the filing as a “next-generation fashion retailer for millennial consumers”, mentions the word influencers a whopping 79 times. Going public also brings on an increased level of scrutiny, and the need for Revolve to make sure its influencers are properly disclosing their relationships to the FTC. That has not always been the case.

This case study shows how health insurance provider AETNA is traversing the difficult terrain of regulation and still managing to mount a robust social media effort.

Any communicator worth their salt knows that video is one of the best ways to engage with audiences, but it’s not as simple as it seems. What platform should your video appear on to reach your target demographics? Are most of your consumers accessing video on desktop or mobile? Is pre-recorded or live video the better option for the product or topic you plan to discuss? 16best, a buyers’ guide and reviewing website that analyzes marketing campaigns in its reviews, knows that while video is a must in marketing in 2018, there’s a lot more that goes into brands using marketing than just shooting, editing and uploading. So it created an infographic about how brands are using video in their marketing strategies, and how consumers react to it.

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.