Social Media & SEO

Bots and automation can help communicators with audience research and faster response times, and fake followers can make you look important. But consumers are smart and want to find a brand they can put their trust in.

Communicators know words mean everything. What you say in a press release, advertisement or tweet can make or break a brand. So it’s not a surprise that search engine optimization remains an important strategic tactic on a digital level. Proper SEO makes sure brands get noticed in that continuous quest to the first page of Google, Yahoo or Bing.

In an ideal world, PR, social media and sales departments would be as flexible and fluid as a professional basketball team moving up and down the court. In this behind-the-scenes look at how the Atlanta Hawks integrate sales, PR and social internally, the Hawks’ social media manager, Nic Bell, shares a case study in integration: how the social team unified PR, customer service and sales functions in order to advertise a slate of games against high-profile teams. (They ultimately sold out their entire Black Friday ticket allotment.)

At 1.1 billion users, the mobile app WeChat is a force to be reckoned with. But for most people in the western world, it’s a black box. Communicators may want to take a look inside, as the platform offers many intriguing opportunities.

Mark Zuckerberg’s op-ed in the Washington Post made a strong call for social media regulation in four areas—harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability. But while vape maker JUUL got ahead of regulation in a smart way, the same PR tactic fell flat for Facebook. Here’s why.

B2B brands are no longer cold, faceless entities. In fact, some of them have enough personality to do well on social media’s most personal channel, Instagram. Here’s a look at the top 10 most-active B2B brands on social in 2018.

In each edition of PRNEWS we highlight takeaways from select articles as well as important notes for subscribers and additions to the PR News Subscriber Resources Center. This month we have takeaways from several articles and a reminder to PRNEWS subscribers to take advantage of the 33 percent discount on all PRNEWS events and webinars.

Conventional wisdom urges brands to own their mistakes and be as transparent as possible with your explanation of them. Another maxim is that when you don’t tell your story, someone else will gladly do it for you, though that version may differ greatly from your narrative. Facebook said it exposed millions of users’ passwords to thousands of its staff. It discovered the issue in January. Why did it wait until the end of March to mention it?

March Madness begins today on hardwood courts around the country for a select group of college basketball teams. To mark this event, our monthly publication PR News asked several members of the 2018 PR News Rising Stars class to dish on the following questions: What about PR and marketing gets you mad and what can be done about it?

What content is TikTok’s burgeoning young audience most interested in? In a word: fun. Hashtag challenges and lip synch contests have become the platform’s vernacular. The app has placed a heavy focus on artificial intelligence, meaning the algorithm learns quickly and is custom-tailored to each user’s tastes. There also isn’t much pressure for users to build a large following—at least not in the same way that Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have quantified influence.