Social Media & SEO

It’s still tough for some American communicators to tell just what all of this means for us, at least until we start to see some consequences from GDPR’s enforcement. Those consequences will arrive by end of year in the form of sanctions, though, according to European Data Protection Supervisor Giovanni Buttarelli.

Google has announced it will be shutting down its seven-year-old social network Google+ for consumers. And while those that swear by Instagram and Snapchat are unlikely to miss the struggling platform, Google+ did get a few things right in terms of communications offerings. Here are three Google+ features that communicators might miss—and some suggestions on how to find those offerings elsewhere.

With Americans set to spend $9 billion on Halloween this year, it could be a good time for brands to bewitch their fan with creative and spooky communication, argues LDWW director David Wolpert. Don’t be a zombie, entice influencers to inject some life (or afterlife) into your brand’s message.

It was temporary relief that Facebook’s largest data breach to date occurred in the midst of non-stop coverage of the Judge Brett Kavanaugh brouhaha. Still, the incident and a story in The Washington Post point to serious issues for Facebook as it attempts to monitor its gargantuan site.

Fashion e-commerce site Revolve filed an IPO this week. The site, which describes itself in the filing as a “next-generation fashion retailer for millennial consumers”, mentions the word influencers a whopping 79 times. Going public also brings on an increased level of scrutiny, and the need for Revolve to make sure its influencers are properly disclosing their relationships to the FTC. That has not always been the case.

Google has the final say in what pages rank at the top of search results. So it makes sense that Google tools would be best suited for measuring the success of your website optimization efforts. In the last few months, Google has unveiled a slate of new features for better understanding website visitor behavior. Here’s a recap of each, with their communications takeaways.

This case study shows how health insurance provider AETNA is traversing the difficult terrain of regulation and still managing to mount a robust social media effort.

Any communicator worth their salt knows that video is one of the best ways to engage with audiences, but it’s not as simple as it seems. What platform should your video appear on to reach your target demographics? Are most of your consumers accessing video on desktop or mobile? Is pre-recorded or live video the better option for the product or topic you plan to discuss? 16best, a buyers’ guide and reviewing website that analyzes marketing campaigns in its reviews, knows that while video is a must in marketing in 2018, there’s a lot more that goes into brands using marketing than just shooting, editing and uploading. So it created an infographic about how brands are using video in their marketing strategies, and how consumers react to it.

Instagram has announced it would be adding the option for “select” brands to allow customers to shop via special tags on Instagram Stories. And, after piloting the feature for several months to its test group, the tap-to-buy option has been made available for all business accounts approved for Shopping. The feature is likely to pay off for brands on the platform. In March, the company published data from a survey stating that more than one in three daily Instagram users say they have become more interested in a brand after seeing it on Instagram Stories.

All recent accusations of bias have one thing in common, the same thing that Facebook has dodged questions of reform or regulation over and generally failed to directly address: its proprietary, micro-targeting ad platform. It was this ad platform that allowed the Russians to pay for propaganda in rubles, it was this ad platform that allowed Cambridge Analytica to manipulate its third-party audience categories, and it was this ad platform that has brought the latest accusations of gender bias back to Facebook.