Social Media

An exclusive Associated Press investigative report on August 13 revealed that “many Google services on Android devices and iPhones store your location data even if you’ve used a privacy setting that says it will prevent Google from doing so.” The investigation was confirmed by computer-science researchers at Princeton.

This past July, Twitter released its Q2 earnings in a letter to shareholders, offering a mostly positive outlook for brands with followers on the platform. Aside from a dip in stock prices after the platform conducted a massive purge of automated bots earlier in the month, and a 19% decline in shares—the platform’s biggest dip since October 2016—the rest of the earnings report is good news for communicators who invest resources in Twitter campaigns.

With 8 billion average daily views of video on Facebook, 4 billion+ on YouTube and one hour of video uploaded to YouTube every second, you’d need to live under a rock not to see social video becoming a preferred medium for storytelling. But how can your brand’s videos compete with excessive noise in the market? Here are ten tips that will ensure your social video garners engagement.

At the PR News Social Media Summit, Twitter’s Nina Mishkin and Dropbox’s Susan Chang spoke on the necessity of capturing attention in a crowded timeline, the importance of proactive social care and how brands today need to thoughtfully participate in cultural moments. Knowing that marketing your product and its features are table stakes, here is what it takes to stand out, win the moment and the customer on Twitter in today’s attention-based economy.

As communication professionals, we’ve heard it before: Don’t try to tell every story. Tell the stories that matter. From creating content that’s in line with your brand identity, to placing trust in your social following, influencers and partners to co-create and amplify content, it’s more important than ever to be relevant or risk being scrolled past in consumers’ news feeds. Here’s how you can cultivate meaningful connections with your social content.

Though daily social media use is ingrained in many peoples’ lives, it seems that major social media companies may have reached a saturation point when it comes to adding new users—at least in a few markets. Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat all reported stagnant or declining user numbers in the second quarter of 2018, prompting speculation about whether they had reached their growth limits.

If you’ve watched a television show on-demand or streamed a popular YouTube video over the last few years, you’ve also likely been prompted to interact with a video ad. Given that engagement is a far more telling insight than mere views, the benefits of having your audience interact with your content are numerous. Interactive content generates four to five times more page views than static content according to LinkedIn, thus facilitating the first, and one of the most challenging, steps in the customer journey—engagement.

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has released a policy paper proposing 20 different paths toward social media regulation. In the paper, Warner divides his proposals into three categories: combating disinformation, protecting user privacy and promoting competition in the tech space. Here’s what the paper’s key points mean for communicators.

Facebook didn’t lose a cow today, it lost nearly all of McDonald’s. The question for communicators, though, is whether or not this is the right time to abandon the platform as a marketing and communications vehicle. It is if you believe Facebook is irreparably damaged and millions of users will depart abruptly. Of course, Facebook could shed several million users gradually and remain the dominant social network.

PayPal’s director of global corporate communications Amanda Miller cautions the next generation of PR professionals to realize that visuals, owned media and social are just a piece in an ecosystem that should include earned media, too.