Social Media & SEO

Coming just days after the Women’s March, PR News’ Top Women in PR awards luncheon in NYC was an ebullient event that brought the PR industry together to celebrate female leadership and the individuals who’ve… Continued

There will be no fake news here.

We’d like to say we and our data partner Shareablee timed the chart (below), which shows the top 30 most-engaged B2B brands on Twitter, to coincide with the start of the presidency of Donald Trump, a tremendous fan of Twitter. In fact, one of the first stories to emerge from the White House after President Trump’s inauguration was that the new president assumed Barack Obama’s @POTUS Twitter handle at 12:01pm ET on Inauguration Day.

Although Twitter has been around for a decade, never in its history have 140 characters had the power and influence they’ve enjoyed since Nov. 9. Sure, when the Pope began tweeting, it made headlines but it didn’t move markets the way @realdonaldtrump has in the last few months. One outlet estimated that one 140-character screed about Lockheed Martin cost the company $28 million per character.

We gathered select members of PR News’ Social Shake-Up Conference board of advisors for a roundtable on social trends for PR News’ premium PR News Pro (and offered to you for free). We also asked about best practices for social storytelling, how to spend little and get a lot from social and how to surmount obstacles to social media in regulated industries, all topics related to sessions on the agenda for the Shake-Up (May 22-24 in Atlanta, socialshakeupshow.com).

Communicators looking to jump on the Facebook Live trend should spend some time seeking inspiration from brands doing it well, and one of the foremost brands of that category is matchmaker eHarmony. We asked social media director Kerianne Mellott for some best practices, and she obliged us with these four Facebook Live tips.

James Chong, senior manager of social customer engagement at TOMS, is tasked with managing TOMS’ social budget while spreading its cause-related messaging to new audiences. Chong, who will be speaking at PR News’ Digital Summit Feb. 24 in Huntington Beach, CA, shares the arguments for paid social that he’s made to senior leaders.

Social platforms are in a constant state of evolution, with new features being rolled out at a breakneck pace. And every brand can benefit from keeping an eye out for upcoming social platform updates and trends. Yelp, for instance, with its diverse audience of businesses and consumers, prioritizes staying current to ensure it serves content in the most engaging way possible. John Carroll, manager of local outreach at Yelp, will be speaking on what’s next in social at PR News’ Digital Summit, Feb. 24 in Huntington Beach, CA. He shares seven trends in social media to be on the look for in 2017.

The Trend: In the first half of 2016, Facebook introduced live streaming, aka Facebook Live, allowing brands and individuals to reach out to their followers in an instant and very visual way. While this wasn’t the first time live streaming was available on social media, the huge audience and demographic reach of Facebook made its foray into this space instantly relevant. Facebook took steps to ensure the adoption of this new feature by letting every follower of every page/individual know when one of the people/brands they follow was live streaming. This makes your potential reach enormous.

Take a glance at various data firms and news outlets that track communications and marketing trends. If there’s one that failed to mention Facebook Live (FBL) as among the top communications trends of 2016 we’d be surprised. We include ourselves in this, with IBM Global Technology Services’ digital experience manager Brandi Boatner saying in these pages last week that FBL had just gotten started last year and predicting it will be far bigger in 2017.

Since President-elect Donald Trump is a controversial figure to say the least, it’s difficult to tell exactly what the impact of an endorsement on a brand’s bottom line would be. Is increased enthusiasm from Trump supporters canceled out by antipathy from his critics, or does one side weigh more heavily than the other—and is the equation different for a New England brand like L. L. Bean and one anchored in Trump country?