Social Media & SEO

Facebook woke up this morning to see another gray hair in the mirror. While Facebook’s popularity with younger users has been on the decline for some time, a new report from market-research firm eMarketer quantifies just how bad this year’s exodus will be. Facebook is set to shed about 2 million users under the age of 24 this year.

This weekend, one of the most-viewed sporting events in the world kicks off in PyeongChang, South Korea. But it’s not just athletes that will be strutting their stuff on the world’s biggest stage. For the brands that serve as official sponsors, the Winter Olympics provide a perfect opportunity to combine storytelling skills with the natural drama of international competition. Here’s a look at how some of those brands are leveraging the games, using everything from influencer marketing strategies to virtual reality experiences.

Twitter delivered a profitable quarter for the first time in its history, beating Wall Street’s expectations with fourth-quarter net income of $91 million. But the cheery news was tempered by the fact that its user growth is stagnant, and even falling in the U.S. Meanwhile, in a tale of two platforms, Snapchat is still bleeding money, yet its user base, particularly among Gen Z, is on the ascent.

By turning to short-form video via channels like Snapchat and Instagram Stories, brands can capture—and keep—the precious attention of their target audience. “As social feeds continue to be overwhelmed by a never-ending influx of content, brand storytellers must embrace a less-is-more approach,” says PwC’s Larissa von Lockner.

Kevin Elliott, U.S. director, risk & crisis communications practice at Hill+Knowlton Strategies, has a favorite aphorism about crisis management: “If you treat a bad day like a crisis, you’ll turn it into one. And if… Continued

Comedian/actor Jim Carrey has begun a campaign to dump Facebook due to the company’s profiting off fake news and ads it sold to Russian agents during the U.S. presidential election. Part of Carrey’s beef is that Facebook still isn’t doing enough to stop it. He’s removed his Facebook page, given up his Facebook shares and urges concerned investors to do the same. Should Facebook consider Carrey’s actions a crisis or a bad day?

Another in our look back at social activity in 2017. Today we examine the most-engaged influencers in the businesspersons’ category.

Did you know 74% of Americans order a takeout pizza or a delivery pizza at least once a month? We didn’t either, but DiGiorno did. And it also knew from social listening that last year 80% of posts about delivery pizza were not positive. That led to a pizza party, er, experiment.

To many of us the Super Bowl is about advertising, not football. Twitter launched a competition for Super Bowl LII with just those people in mind. Its inaugural #BrandBowl pitted Super Bowl advertisers against each other in various categories looking at the highest engagement across a given industry while the game aired. One category, #Interception, looked solely at brands without a Super Bowl ad that drove high engagement. The #Interception award winner, Ally Bank, had to cut through the online noise generated by some of the nation’s largest brands.

At the start of 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that big changes are coming to Facebook’s news feed—specifically, a de-emphasis of branded and publishers’ content in news feeds—and we’re already seeing the effects of some of those changes. PR News spoke with five communicators to see if the decrease in time spent on Facebook, and the company’s recent changes in its news feed algorithm, is cause for concern and augers a shift in their own content strategy.