Social Media & SEO

Rarely do I mess with cookies, except to eat them. But an experience over the last two weeks with a furniture retailer had me clearing the cookies from my computer. So annoyed was I by… Continued

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Snapchat must be feeling full of itself this week. Even before everyone had a chance to absorb the news and implications of Instagram’s new geostickers, parent company Facebook officially launched Messenger Day, another clone of Snapchat’s “Stories” format, for iOS and Android.

As we reach the two-year anniversaries of live-streaming mobile apps Meerkat and Periscope, it’s a good opportunity to remember that even if your business hasn’t yet broadcast its first live video, we’re still very much in the early adoption phase. And while the moniker “live-streaming professional” is thrown around a lot, some in the community are truly hitting their stride and creating genre-defining content. If you consider yourself new to the space, here are six outstanding live streamers to learn from before you implement your own strategy.

Instagram’s not shy about its attempts to encroach upon Snapchat’s territory; it even copies the names of the features it’s aping. In mid-2016 it introduced Stories, and now geostickers have come to the platform, Instagram announced March 7. As on Snapchat, the stickers are customized to a particular location (at launch, only New York City and Jakarta are supported).

Please put down your smartphone for a moment (after reading this paragraph on your smartphone) and ask yourself if you’re addicted to your smartphone. You may try to weasel out of answering the question by… Continued

With more than 1.7 billion monthly active users, Facebook already gives marketers better reach and audience insight than any other platform on the web. Now, with Facebook Live, marketers can get face-to-face with their audience in real-time. It’s a new era for both engagement and traffic, when done correctly. But how can marketers leverage the platform to drive more users to their site? Here are four tips to keep in mind to optimize your Facebook Live strategy.

There was more going on at the Oscars than the PR issues a pair of PwC employees caused. There was a great deal of social media traffic involving sponsors, film brands and the celebrity presenters, among others. Using Shareablee data provided to us we found Instagram was the dominant social platform during the broadcast. For example Viola Davis’ Instagram feed drove more than half of her total actions. Presenter Hailee Steinfeld posted just five times, all to her Instagram account.

In an era of severely limited organic reach, a paid social strategy that optimizes your budget is critical. But how can you best use promoted posts to reach your business goals without breaking the bank? That was the central question tackled by James Chong, senior manager of social customer engagement at TOMS, and Lauren de la Fuente, vice president of marketing and communications at Boingo Wireless, at PR News’ Digital Summit Feb. 24.

This update is important because it takes over a function of Facebook, long the platform of choice for posting albums of pictures. Another important consequence for brands: Instagram users will get in the habit of swiping left and right to see more content, thereby becoming more comfortable with carousel ads, which have already been available to advertisers but different enough from a normal Instagram post that users might not have been inclined to swipe—until now.

It looks like WhatsApp is taking a page out of Snapchat’s book, just as Instagram did before it. On Monday, WhatsApp unveiled a new wrinkle to its “Status” feature, adding the ability for users to share videos, GIFs and pictures with their friends for just 24 hours before disappearing. Those visuals can be customized with emojis, written upon and captioned as well. In the past, users could only update their status with text—now you can show, rather than just tell, your friends what you’re up to.