Social Media & SEO

Top communicators have pointed to video—where Facebook has made major investments in recent years—as the next best frontier of online advertising. While Facebook Live remains a popular and highly viewed feature for organic content, Facebook Watch seems to be the frontrunner for Facebook’s ad business. Here’s what we know so far about advertising on Watch.

YouTube is trying to manage the tide of the troubling Tide Pod Challenge, deleting posts of users eating the colorful detergent packets, in the latest black eye for the platform. While the trend has prompted Tide’s parent company, Procter & Gamble, to mount a public service campaign, it also underscores YouTube’s challenges in governing its content and addressing advertiser concerns.

Is anyone listening? When it comes to social listening, the answer is yes. The trouble is that nearly 40% of brands lack a formal plan for social listening, according to new survey from PRNews and LexisNexis. Even more concerning is that these brands have failed to implement procedures for what happens when social listening picks up a potential issue.

If you thought Mark Zuckerberg’s New Year’s resolution to “fix” Facebook was just like your resolution to stop eating candy (as in, never going to happen), think again. Late Thursday, Zuckerberg announced major changes coming to the platform—namely, a de-emphasis of branded content in news feeds—and those changes will likely have a serious impact on your brand’s approach to the platform.

2017 could be described as the year of social video, particularly for U.S. B2C brands, as data provided exclusively to PR News by Shareablee demonstrates. It was also a year where brands began to become more mature in their social media choices, posting fewer times but accruing more consumer engagement.

It’s not a surprise that Facebook is the dominant social platform. That was one of the conclusions from the 3rd annual RBC Capital Markets study of 5,000 U.S. Internet users. There were surprises, though. One of them was the satisfaction rates of the various platforms (Facebook could do better here). Another surprise (well, not really) was the dominant showing of Snapchat with children and teens.

One of the holy grails of PR must be the definitive word on Google’s SEO regime. While that might be unattainable we can make educated guesses as to how the search giant ranks articles. Branded3 of the U.K. has issued its list of best guesses as well as a list of things that can be done to a site and its contents to improve searchability ranking.

Many of us believe we know all about activist investors. A pair of investors threw a curveball last weekend, urging that Apple seriously consider warning parents about the dangers of excessive iPhone use for children and teens. Their demands were well crafted and included a bevy of studies and statistics.

As we know, there is a lot of enthusiasm for engaging with influencers on social media. Yet few communicators spend time strategizing about possible risks, says Emma Monks, head of trust & safety at Crisp Thinking.… Continued

There’s a line in the movie “Molly’s Game” I think you’ll appreciate. As the young and future Olympic-level skier Molly Bloom was learning the sport from her father, he gave her this advice on the… Continued