Social Media & SEO

In part I of this story in our Oct. 17 edition we looked at how brands can strengthen their YouTube content without spending too much money. This week we’ll explore several best practices for measuring your YouTube efforts. Need an incentive to make sure your brand is engaged with YouTube? How’s the fact that 88% of all video searches result in a YouTube video? Or that after behemoth Google, YouTube is the largest search engine?

This weekly feature asks communicators to spot trends and discuss their reactions to them. In this edition we hear from Kira Clayborne, senior manager, digital media, Church’s Chicken. Clayborne discusses how brands should react when it finds fans speaking for them on social.

When you see the high-quality, professionally recorded, intensely edited videos that some brands put out there, you may be pessimistic about what you can do on a small or nonexistent budget with nothing but your smartphone. But don’t mentally connect pedestrian equipment with pedestrian results. The content is the thing.

Brands, in an effort to get out a shareable tweet or a super-likeable post, are often caught in a daily trap of shallow engagement with its communities. Your stakeholders — humans just like you and… Continued

“Organic is dead.” Whether or not you agree with this statement, social media platforms unquestionably favor sponsored posts over organic posts in followers’ feeds, and it’s now more important than ever to secure a paid social media budget if you want your brand’s posts to rise above the throng. But how can PR professionals make the case for those budget dollars with the C-suite given the ever-present challenge of proving ROI on social media?

Working outside of the limitations of smartphone-captured footage, communicators can now stream professional-quality video directly to Twitter. While smartphone video has its place within Periscope and on platforms like Snapchat, brands now have the ability to widen their approach to streaming.

If you’re a brand communicator, you’re not likely to wade into politically hot waters, but in this incendiary cultural moment any topic can inflame certain groups of people—or the government. The Amy Goodman case in particular demonstrates the increasing power and inherent dangers of live streaming and the seriousness with which government authorities are approaching the medium.

Without Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump appearing in your brand’s YouTube video, and lacking the professionals and budgets of the major broadcast, cable and Spanish-language networks, does your brand’s video stand a chance? Indubitably so, communicators tell us. In this first of this two-part series we’ll concentrate on bolstering your YouTube content; part II, in a future edition, will focus on measurement and analytics.

As the company tries to focus on everything live—from streaming on Periscope to following breaking news and events—savvy users will notice a blending of old and new in the new feature. Explore takes two tools Twitter created for compiling essentially separate conversations and blends them together. Long-time Twitter users will see pieces of the now defunct “Discover” feature—suggested account and trending topics—coexisting alongside Moments’ signature highlights.

Today’s SEO is a complex stew of content, links, site performance, user experience and a bunch of other variables pushed to perform in a wide array of environments. But for all the considerations that go into developing a successful SEO strategy, it’s important to remember that the driving force behind SEO is people. At its core, SEO is just a machine that’s trying to keep up with humans’ search expectations by monitoring and emulating their behaviors. Keywords are one of the ways that search engines do this.