Social Media & SEO

Podcasts are becoming more mainstream and so are finding their place in the tool kits of brand communicators. Are they right for your brand? If so, what should the podcast cover? Should it be a thinly veiled sales pitch or a storytelling vehicle that barely mentions your brand by name? We ask a pair of podcast veterans for best practices.

There are many things even a supposedly staid brand can do on social media to enhance awareness. Here’s what the Chartered Financial Advisor Institute has been doing on social media to humanize its brand and make it a bit more human and fun.

Measuring reach on Facebook has become far more complex than simply using one metric to count how many people witnessed a piece of content. A mix of different KPIs must be considered in tandem to determine where, how and why users are seeing (or not seeing) your brand’s Facebook content, according to Karen Vega, senior director of social media activations and earned media at Viacom Velocity.

When Cisco’s Talent Brand team opened an Instagram account, it didn’t just throw a few photos into the feed, bedazzle them with hashtags and call it a day. The company knew that getting people to show up and remain engaged with the account would be a challenge. So, how did @WeAreCisco’s Instagram account grow from zero to 18,000 followers, with healthy engagement rates, without paying a dime? Here’s how.

For years, podcasting was overshadowed by other forms of emerging media, but its momentum continues to grow. More than 10 billion podcasts were downloaded and streamed on Apple devices alone in 2016, an increase of more than 2 billion from the year before. And every week, new brands jump into the space, using podcasts as a form of content marketing, a dynamic way to attract new customers. But for brands looking to build an audience, the key is to focus on content first and marketing second.

Google’s AdWords can be an expensive proposition, particularly for nonprofits. The brand’s Ad Grants can help, providing AdWords for free, with several restrictions. Here is a step-by-step account of how qualifying nonprofits can take advantage of this excellent program.

Many brands have added Facebook Live to their social media arsenals to give audiences a behind-the-scenes look at trade shows and events. But with live video, haste commonly creates waste. In pursuit of an insider experience one can easily disregard the time and preparation needed to ensure a live stream leaves a good impression.

So you’re writing keyword-rich copy in the inverted pyramid style, including backlinks and making sure all your pages have unique and clear titles? That’s great, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to maximizing SEO potential. At the 2017 Social Shake-Up, Carolyn Shelby, SEO director at tronc, Inc., took the audience to school on all of the above, plus more key areas where communications pros have a blind spot.

When I ask my friends in PR what they’d do with a bigger budget, their first instinct is to smile that “yeah, right!” smile. It’s hard enough to keep the budget they have much less… Continued

If you followed this year’s sold-out Social Shake-Up Show online, you know the FOMO-inspiring tweets and posts were flying fast and furious. Here are a curated set of six tweets from the event—from attendee Kelly Stone, social media manager from CompTIA—showcasing some of her key takeaways, including the need to produce influencer guidelines, the value of vulnerability and why you should always put your followers first.