Social Media & SEO

Does your brand’s Instagram channel stand out among the other 25 million business profiles on the platform? If not, it could be because your feed and profile don’t embrace a strong visual identity.

Facebook released its long-hidden community guidelines this week in another move to curry favor with the public after the Cambridge Analytica fiasco. A post on the company’s newsroom explains how Facebook’s content policies are developed and enforced, and introduces a new appeals process for posts that may have been removed by mistake. But will this newfound transparency be enough to rebuild public trust in the social giant?

Last week we examined the top 10 U.S. B2C brands’ social activity in Q1 2018. Generating 2.1 billion consumer engagements across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, B2C’s grew their consumer engagement 4%

GDPR has nothing to do with GDP, although some portion of gross domestic product may be needed to reach GDPR compliance. Seriously, a new study shows most firms are not ready for Europe’s GDPR regime, which comes into effect next month.

Trust, thy name is not Facebook. Go, ahead, Google it. But is Google a trusted source? Joking aside, Facebook is not the sole tech brand with a trust deficit. Put Google in that category, based on a new Gallup

YouTube is once again in hot water for running ads on channels promoting disturbing content, a CNN investigation has uncovered. More than 300 organizations had their ads running on channels promoting Nazis and North Korean propaganda, to name two. For now, brands are still willing to take the risk.

Vero, the no-ad, no-algorithm social media app may go the way of Meerkat, Ping and Orkut. Time will tell. Still, brands can learn a few things about transparency, listening and authenticity from Vero’s early success. The bottom line: Customers across all industries value transparency in paid and organic messaging as well as increased attention to consumer insights.

Snapchat has announced a new feature, Shoppable Lenses, that aims to win brands’ advertising dollars by trading “soft” metrics like opens and impressions for clickthroughs, conversions and calls to action that can be tied directly to sales. The feature, which uses Snapchat’s AR lenses and allows users to virtually try a new product, could be a game changer for B2C brands, while acting as a proof-of-concept for companies wary of the platform.

Social media has become the foundation for communications measurement, in part because each platform comes with its own analytics feature that communicators can use to measure an endless variety of outputs and outcomes. But it’s important to remember that only using the native analytics features will not give you a full picture.

The social trends of 2017 seem to continue into 2018. In our first look at U.S. B2C brands for 2018 we see companies generally posting fewer pieces of content, but gaining consumer engagement. The data provided to us exclusively by Shareablee shows beauty and fashion brands dominating the first quarter of 2018 in terms of consumer engagement with social posts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.