Social Media & SEO

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.

If the lines between paid, owned and earned media have become blurred, why is the internal structure at most organizations still so linear? In this commentary, Brooks Thomas, social business advisor with Southwest Airlines, argues for a more integrated approach and provides four tips for smaller organizations looking to bust down the silos between those three types of content.

YouTube videos can sometimes seem like the one-hit wonders of the content universe. But the good news is that through strong SEO strategy and tactical outreach, little-noticed YouTube videos can still be a powerful vehicle for drawing in new audiences. Matt Goldberg, who creates and promotes video content for Chicago-based machine tool manufacturer Lyndex-Nikken—as well as founding production company MBG Films, which boasts 8.5 million views and over 13,000 subscribers—shares 10 recommendations for increasing YouTube views.

Kristy Gillentine spends a lot of time chatting about Snapchat. Host of the popular “ChatSnap—The Twitter Chat All About Snapchat,” Gillentine interviews such social superstars as Shonduras, Brian Fanzo and Madelyn Sklar once a week to share cutting-edge tips and tricks about the platform. But for those brand communicators just looking to establish their presence on Snapchat, she offered the following tips.

In the course of your career, you’ll have attended dozens if not hundreds of industry events where – if you’re like most human attendees – you’ve exchanged business cards as if by rote, refilled your… Continued

Few brands are enjoying more success on social media than Taco Bell. We asked Taco Bell’s social media and brand engagement manager Matt Prince to let us in on some of the secrets and best practices he uses. Rule number one: Know your audience and where it lives. Two: Talk with fans as if they were friends of yours. And drop the jargon, corporate-speak and promotional content.

Your brand launched an Instagram account and built a following, but your engagement and audience growth has plateaued. So, now what? To spark fresh interest in the platform, Noah Champion Buck, executive director of Los Angeles-based Wagstaff Digital, says it’s crucial to pair a data-based approach with ingenuity and experimentation. Buck shared six steps toward crafting more tactical and inventive Instagram content.

Ben Aronson, social media and digital director at Adams & Knight, argues that completion rate is the single metric that you should pay the most attention to, because it is the clearest way to tell how engaged your audience is. After all, if your video gets lots of shares but people are only watching the first few seconds, your message isn’t really getting across. Aronson gives the following tips to power up your completion rates and other metrics.