Social Media & SEO

Twitter is inviting users in the U.S., the U.K. and Japan to participate in its new program, Promote Mode. The program automatically promotes all tweets for $99 a month. What the social platform isn’t saying is that with this new program, Twitter, like Facebook, sees itself primarily as an ad platform. Allowing users to automate the promotion process—making every paid tweet count more than one without dollars behind it—means Twitter is further distancing itself from its organic roots.

The role of a communications pro has drastically changed. Now, all communications strategies need to be integrated with a mix of paid, earned, social/shared and owned media. We recently talked to Anna Ruth Williams, founder and CEO of ARPR—who will be speaking about PESO at the upcoming PR News Media Relations Conference— about how smaller brands with a communications “team” of just one person can optimize every letter of PESO to effectively spread their message.

No doubt your grandparents have heard of Twitter from President Trump’s constant use of the platform. And you doubtless know that today is the official date for Twitter to expand its 140-character limit to 280. But what pundits have dubbed a bad move for the social media bird’s brand may end up benefitting PR pros and marketers.

With President Trump inserting his new-media channel of choice, Twitter, into global media almost on a daily basis, these seem to be heady times for the social platform. Yes, it’s struggling to attract more eyeballs… Continued

As we’ve seen in recent weeks, a tumultuous news cycle—compounded by an online community rattled by recent violent events—can be a breeding ground for rumors, hoaxes and false reports. In the last few days alone, the San Antonio shooter was misidentified as a member of both the alt-right and alt-left movements, Twitter swirled with rumors of Snapchat’s demise and Facebook pulled a failed fake-news curtailing experiment.

Juli Briskman, who worked in marketing and communications, was fired from Akima LLC for using the photo of her flipping-off President Trump’s motorcade as her profile photo. While we don’t know Akima’s exact social media policy, many companies have taken similar actions—in the eyes of employers, an employee’s personal social media pages reflect on a company.

Scheduling tweets and recycling old content are best practices, but the NRA failed to take into account that it is an extremely crisis-prone brand and scheduled a tweet that looked insensitive in the context of the Texas church shooting. This should be addressed in every brand’s crisis plan.

When Papa John’s blamed its declining sales on the issue of NFL players kneeling during the national anthem, many found the correlation hard to believe. DiGiorno Pizza saw the opportunity to call them out for it on Twitter and did not hold back, while Pizza Hut subtly thrust itself into the spotlight.

A difficult week for Twitter continued with an 11-minute shutdown of President Trump’s Twitter account. What steps Twitter plans to take to prevent another hijacking of the most influential Twitter account in the U.S. remain to be seen.

That idea you have, which everyone is calling crazy and couldn’t possibly work: well, it probably won’t work. But you should try it anyway. Such was the advice of Guy Kawasaki (pictured), venture capitalist and… Continued