Social Media & SEO

Paid social just got a little easier on our favorite ephemeral social network. Snapchat announced that users can now design Custom Geofilters within the app via an easy-to-use interface. Just open the Settings menu, tap On-Demand Geofilters and you’ll be able to select from a list of occasions, such as Graduation, Wedding and Birthdays. Then you can choose from a number of templates and edit them with the same text, Bitmoji and sticker tools that you use on snaps.

Snapchat introduced a new tracking feature called Snap Map last week, allowing users to share their location as well as see where their friends are and, in some cases, what they’re doing. While the new tool has raised some privacy concerns, it also has some implications for brand communicators— it could become a great tool for event-based promotion and local businesses, says Andrea Limas, social media strategist for the University of San Francisco, and Kristy Gillentine, vice president of public engagement at Drive West Communications.

Many social media teams lament that they don’t have enough budget, headcount or support to have a real impact on the business. Yet it’s often these same teams that fail to connect the dots. Your senior leaders don’t care about likes and retweets, they care about impact on business results. Here’s a four-step process on how to frame the discussion and speak their language to get more headcount and budget for social.

For the past decade, people have argued about where social media should sit in a company’s organization chart. But ultimately, there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach—social media’s location should be a direct reflection of a business’s core priorities. For some organizations, social media is best seen as an extension of customer service, while for others, it may make more sense to locate it within marketing or communications. Here’s why.

What are the best ways to get buy-in on social media from the C-suite? The Conference Board’s senior researcher Alexander Parkinson shares what he found as he conducted research for a recent report on the subject.

As United Way of Miami-Dade’s one-person social media team, Shairy Gonzalez has to be nimble enough to address different audiences from day to day or even moment to moment. She might attend a fundraising event with corporate movers and shakers in the morning, and later get her hands dirty at a volunteer site in the afternoon. Gonzalez, who will speak at the upcoming Digital and Marketing Show in Miami, October 17-19, shared some examples of how she engages vastly different audiences on social media.

For many businesses, leads and sales are primary KPIs. But before you can track sales, you have to generate them—and standing out from the crowd on social media is no easy task. Online consumers can anticipate when ads are coming and know when and how to skip them. Fortunately, major platforms, including Facebook, Snapchat and Pinterest, continue to develop new technologies to help generate and track sales, helping to prove the ROI of social media ads.

Cultivating a body of reviews is an important aspect of engaging with your customers on social. It can further establish you as a reputable brand, teach you which areas you could be improving on, boost SEO, start important conversations and more. If you’re not getting reviews—or if you’re only getting them from one kind of customer (satisfied, dissatisfied, one-time, returning, etc.) you might be missing out on a lot of useful information.

Kelly Stone is on a mission to evangelize careers in information technology. As the senior social media manager for CompTIA, a nonprofit trade association for Information Technology professionals, Stone is tasked with softening the IT industry’s image to a younger demographic. And Instagram has emerged as one of her most effective weapons in fighting negative stereotypes. Here are four ways she uses the platform to humanize the industry and her own organization.

In part II of our interview with Taco Bell’s social media and brand engagement manager Matt Prince, we ask him about how the brand manages during the initial moments of a potential crisis. With 7,000 restaurants across the country, incidents pop up constantly, he tells us, making social listening crucial. We also discuss the particulars of how Prince and his team measurement and report metrics to the C-Suite.