Social Media

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.

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.

The positive elements of an employee-advocacy program are easy to see, including the possibility of extensive reach on social media and the effort’s ability to control costs. Still, such programs will be a poor fit for some brands. Here are a half-dozen things to consider as you begin to think about launching an employee-advocacy program for your brand.

Though social media marketing is vital to the success of any business, staying abreast of changing trends can be a challenge. To help communicators keep up, Pan Communications has released an infographic of user and marketing data for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn that shows how much things have changed in the past year.

It’s through listening to the data, selecting your audiences carefully, experimenting and not being afraid to fail that social communicators can figure out what actually matters for them.