Social Media & SEO

PR News recruited a Snapchat expert, Leslie Douglas, senior social media manager at PwC, for a crash course in Snapchat layout and navigation. At the Snapchat Boot Camp in NYC, she walked the audience through the app’s sometimes-counterintuitive interface. We share a few takeaways from Leslie’s presentation.

It could describe nearly all the data sets we’ve been looking at recently. The 30 most-engaged U.S. brands on a social media platform turned out a bit less content than they had during a quarter the previous year, yet consumer interaction with the content rose. Once again, consumer engagement with mobile video drove that engagement. Filling in the blanks, this week’s Shareablee data, provided exclusively to PR News, examines consumer actions, or engagement, with U.S. B2B brands on Twitter. Actions are defined as the sum of consumer likes and retweets. Brands listed have significant B2B revenue, although some also have B2C businesses. Specifically in Q1 ’16 (Jan 1-March 31), total consumer actions with U.S. B2B brands on Twitter rose 31% compared to the same quarter in 2015. The increase occurred despite a 3% reduction in the number of tweets the brands produced. An increase in consumer engagement with U.S. B2B brands’ videos, up a gargantuan 240%, and more retweets, a 14% rise, fueled the growth in actions.

Just this week, Snapchat added a feature called Memories, which enables users to save their snaps and stories and find them again easily. PR News’ followers on Twitter have been complaining that Memories is just one more step in Snapchat’s transformation into a Facebook wannabe. The ephemeral fun’s gone. For some, it’s time to move on to—what, exactly?

On July 6 Snapchat began rolling out Memories, a new feature that, depending on your point of view, adds to the app or chips away at something unique to the platform: impermanence. Users will now be able to save their Snaps and Stories to Memories, find them again by opening Memories (located under the camera button) and scrolling or typing keywords, and re-Snap them to your friends.

First and foremost, you have to understand your audience, says Chad Mitchell, Walmart’s senior director of digital communications. Not even a brand as big as Walmart can boil the ocean when it comes to audience. So you have to ask questions like, “Who wants to hear from us?” or “Who needs to hear from us?” and then build a content and channel strategy that’s tailor-made for your audience.

If you’ve been following Juno’s historic launch into Jupiter’s orbit, you’re not alone. Along with the consideration of multiple demographics in its presentation of content, NASA has mastered successful coordination and cross-promotion on social throughout Juno’s approach. While making excellent use of the public’s recent acceptance of live stream into the mainstream, the space agency has been driving traffic to its websites and video streams via coordinated, cross-promoted social media campaigns.

OK, so Snapchat has made the grade. This leads us to…the next Snapchat. To celebrate Social Media Day, PR News looked to the future and compiled this list of emerging apps and technologies PR pros should keep an eye on. Then again, maybe nothing on this list will be around for next year’s Social Media Day.

Once you have the basics of Snapchat down, Geofilters are a next-level tool for reaching your audience. It may not be obvious at first how to use both Community (free) and On-Demand (paid) Geofilters to engage an audience, but once you learn how to think about them from various angles, there are several ways to be smart and strategic about Geofilter use.

The shift in focus to paid social media content is redefining, yet again, the role of the PR professional—a topic that David Kellis, director of PR and social media for the Clorox Co., will dive into in his opening Wake-Up Call session at PR News’ Big 4 Social Media Summit in San Francisco. “In the past, we’ve done PR around advertising in magazines and other media. That’s what we’ve come to with social,” Kellis says.

You’re halfway through what’s been a rather interesting year in business, politics, brand successes and blunders and Game of Thrones developments. Which is to say: you still have another five solid months to make this… Continued