Social Media & SEO

The “Facebook Apocalypse” dominated conversations at Social Media Marketing World 2018, as brands prepare for a post-organic new world order. But for communicators, the future doesn’t have to be a dystopia of direct deposits into Facebook’s bank account. By mastering short-form and live video, focusing on storytelling and remembering to keep the humanity intact, your social media strategy can shift focus away from the brand and toward the consumer.

Do social media giants Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat have a viable, upstart competitor? Vero, launched and funded by billionaire Ayman Hariri in 2015, has found overnight popularity by offering free accounts to the first 1 million users, making it the No. 1 social media app on iTunes as of the morning of Feb. 27.

Similar to other segments we’ve been reviewing during the past few weeks, the Health & Fitness category owes much of its 2017 growth in consumer engagement with its social posts to video. In addition, it’s following the pattern of other industries, which have posted fewer pieces of content and increased engagement. CrossFit was the leader in this category in 2017, Shareablee says.

“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” There’s good news and bad news for Facebook in terms of U.S. adult usage. The bad news is usage levels likely will fall in 2018, something that’s not happened in nearly one decade. The good news is it can absorb small reductions in usage for many years without its dominant position being threatened.

As a communicator, you can have a powerful impact on just about every corner of your organization by using the platforms, relationships and knowledge that you and your PR team are uniquely positioned to leverage.… Continued

While Snapchat’s redesign has caused a fierce resistance among its user base—prompting an online petition with 1.2 million signatures asking Snap, Inc. to revert to the original design—creators and brands are poised to benefit from the facelift. Over the last month, the platform has rolled out a suite of analytics, started growing an e-commerce platform and opened up its advertising API while offering new advertisers free credits to give Snapchat a test drive.

Is it a trend? After several weeks of reporting 2017 data from several sectors we think so. B2B and B2C brands are posting fewer pieces of social media content yet piling up more consumer engagement actions. This week we look at the hotel sector in 2017 and sure enough, it’s grabbing engagement with fewer pieces of content. The Four Seasons leads the way.

The horrific events in South Florida that left 17 people dead and roughly twice that number wounded was the 25th fatal, active school shooting since Columbine in April 1999. While the shootings share many characteristics, they differed in a number of the ways communications figured into the equation.

Financial firms are generally thought to be shy about social media. Not so, at least in 2017, according to data provided exclusively to PR News by Shareablee. The sector combined for some 58 million consumer interactions in 2017, which represents modest growth vs 2016. And it accomplished this despite posting fewer pieces of content.

It’s dangerous to take anything out of context, particularly data. Facebook’s user numbers are gargantuan and are continuing to grow modestly. Still, digging down, you’ll find older people fueling its growth and younger folks departing or not visiting the social channel at all.