Social Media & SEO

Though many don’t realize it, SEO is influenced by every department that touches digital content in a given organization. While you don’t have to be a technical genius to understand how that impacts your marketing and communications efforts, it’s important to be aware that even if you hand off SEO to your resident SEO expert or to an agency, your actions with your brand’s digital content are already affecting your search rankings.

James Nickerson will kick off the Facebook for Communicators Boot Camp at PR News’ Social Media Summit on Aug. 9 with a timely invocation on where the platform is going, including why regulation might not be a bad thing for Facebook and the ramifications of GDPR for users. Tying these future-focused topics together is Nickerson’s belief that marketers are in a unique position to heal the growing disconnect between brands’ trust in the platform and the distrust felt by end users.

At its Social Media Summit in San Francisco on Aug. 10, PR News will honor Madison Dowswell of PepsiCo, Ashley Frohnert of PETA and Jessica McGlory of Jellyfish as its 2018 Social Media Luminaries. The Social Media Luminaries awards program celebrates of-the-moment social media marketing pioneers.

Most communicators would agree it’s important for audiences to be able to find their press releases in a Google search. But how can they make sure the right audiences and journalists find those releases?

The first step is making the most of your search data, according to Laura Mitchell, director of digital for Cisco.com, who leads SEO for the technology company’s core web property. Mitchell and her team have a proven system for tying search data to desirable outcomes such as having target readers find releases and other timely content.

Musk’s latest Twitter gaffe should remind communicators that messaging from your leadership is often the most prominent and front-facing indicator of your brand’s values. As the head of a major brand, Musk’s inflammatory style may be alienating potential Tesla customers and damaging the brand in the long term. Here are a couple of lessons brands can learn from steering clear of Musk’s tactics.

Although Twitter has been perhaps the slowest social platform to adopt Facebook’s pay-to-play publishing model, it’s now zeroing in on the biggest boon it offers brands: its role as a news source. Twitter is testing a new feature, Promoted Trend Spotlight, which would appear on users’ feeds as a banner ad when they navigate to the Explore tab of the app, which aggregates trending news.

A Nicki Minaj critic recently learned the hard way that bullying on social media is now the norm. Brands will increasingly find it harder to engage in this hostile playground without getting bruised. Here are some best practices your social team can use to keep this negativity at a minimum.

Newsjacking, or piggybacking, on a news story or event about another brand to generate publicity for your brand, is a perfectly acceptable practice in PR. Yet it must be done with care and insight. A soy sauce brand managed to do this well on 7-11 Day. Fear not, though, the brand, Kikkoman, was savvy enough to dis the idea of a soy sauce-flavored Slurpee.

Would you rather your audiences use their smartphones to point and click—or point and buy? Given the pressure on communicators to tie their efforts to the bottom line, we’d wager that the latter is preferable for most. And now, if a rumored Snapchat-Amazon integration is any indication, social media audiences will soon be able to point their smartphones at objects in their native environments and purchase those products directly through Amazon.

Twitter has deleted more than 70 million accounts engaging in suspicious and “trolling” behavior throughout May and June, and shows no sign of slowing down in July. This should make the platform more trusted by users and brands, but the effects on its stock price and opportunities for user growth are up in the air.