Social Media & SEO

Rumors have been circulating in tech blog circles this week that Apple has been developing a camera app-based social sharing tool to rival Snapchat and Instagram. Given the likelihood of the next generation of smartphone buyers to prioritize visual language—sharing photos and video over text—over text-based communications, this is a smart move for the tech giant, especially as Facebook and Google continue to grow in influence.

According to FTC guidelines, paid social media posts must carry a “clear and conspicuous” disclosure that they are in effect paid advertisements; starting a post with #ad, for example, would suffice. But a letter sent Aug. 17 to the Kardashian/Jenner family and their sponsors alleges that the celebrities in question routinely “engaged in deceptive marketing campaigns” by failing to disclose their relationships with companies paying them for endorsements.

Pinterest has acquired Instapaper, an app for saving articles and pages for later reading. The matchup makes sense, given Pinterest’s parallel model of pinning images and video for later review. While there have been article and link-saving apps on the market for years, Instapaper has a few unique features that make it attractive to bigger platforms and potential buyers (this sale is its second acquisition in recent years), and several applications that make it worthwhile for communicators to keep an eye on in the long term.

Shareablee provides data exclusively to PR News Pro about the brands (B2B and B2C) who were most engaged during August 5-17, the first 12 days of the Olympics.

A roundup of the week’s top news and trends in PR. This week we look at more implications of FTC actions against paid influencers, the passing of Ed Block.

Is advertising on Pinterest for you? According to Pew Research Center, Pinterest users are mostly white or Hispanic women under 50, often college-educated and earning $30k or more, but spread fairly equally across urban, suburban and rural populations. If this sounds like your demographic, take a good look at getting in on the ground floor of the newest addition to the Great Video Explosion of 2016.

If it’s your job to create and share content on behalf of a brand, then you know the feeling of shooting in the dark. You’re constantly asking yourself if an article or blog post idea… Continued

In a new move to establish itself as a player in visual media, Twitter has released promoted stickers for users to slap on photos, with Pepsi as its launch partner. Promoted stickers allow brands to design four to eight images that appear in the group of stickers users can scroll through and select when decorating photos in the app. Twitter’s blog pitches the branded stickers as “an opportunity for brands to drive brand affinity and raise awareness of their message at scale…to create an interactive experience.”

SEO can be one of the most powerful tools at a communicator’s disposal—if it’s used correctly. Having an optimized website will drive valuable free traffic that can be converted into leads, advocates, fans and customers. But SEO can work against a site too, making poorly optimized destinations all but disappear. One of the bedrocks of a competent SEO strategy is having the right metrics in place. But with the fluid nature of Google’s algorithm changes, metrics have to be consistently monitored. Before the work of monitoring and adjusting an SEO strategy can begin, a baseline needs to be established.

According to Facebook-owned Instagram, the new tools provide an easy—and free—way to get recognized as a business on Instagram and, most importantly, to get insights about customers. Audience insights can be gleaned without leaving the app. Well-performing posts can then be promoted as ads, again, within the app.