Ranging from important corporate and governmental announcements, to news and user information sharing, social media has been a huge part of our lives for more than a decade. Like it or hate it, social media platforms are simultaneously a time sink, a large entertainment network, a news and opinion dissemination tool and a lot more. Find below some of our thoughts and facts about it.
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime ~ Chinese proverb
You know what they say – give a man a fish and you’ll feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and he’ll be out on the lake every dang weekend with his fishing buddies. Oh, wait – we weren’t talking about my husband’s fishing habit? Just kidding (mostly).
All joking aside, I’m here to start teaching you how to fish.
This post was first published by Melissa Drozdowski on Interprose’s blog, Interprose Voice.
Several weeks ago, my family and I attended my daughter’s cheerleading championships. Upon entering the arena, a torrent of candy-colored signage promoting the company’s social media accounts and in particular, a custom Snapchat filter created just for the day’s event, greeted us.
Knowing my own daughter would surgically attach her phone to her hand if she could, I guessed the filter would prove popular among the gazillion or so teen girls flitting around the arena, as well as all the parents, family, and friends in the stands. What I didn’t realize was just how wildly popular it would be – the snaps were piling up, hundreds of stories were being updated in real-time, and views were soaring higher than a cheerleader at the top of a basket toss.
This post was first published by Melissa Drozdowski on Interprose’s blog, Interprose Voice.
As the old saying goes, “Nothing stays the same but change.” And for Twitter users, there are some rather interesting changes afoot. As the social media juggernaut continues to struggle with the question of what it wants to be when it grows up, Twitter has decided to make some long-overdue (in my opinion, anyway) refinements. Unfortunately, not all of these forthcoming changes are as momentous as you’d think…and they could even cause some downright gnarly issues (think the Law of Unintended Consequences). Read more
Do you have something to say? Did you just attend an amazing event like SXSW and want to share your key takeaways with your professional network? Or are you seeing trends in your industry that you want to talk about? The list of topics where you might want to share your two cents goes on and on. Now what are you going to do about it? Answer: sharing your experiences in a blog post.
But how, you might ask? Your company doesn’t have a blog already set up and you don’t have the time to invest in creating your own blog – plus, how would you even get people to read it?
LinkedIn Pulse is your solution. LinkedIn’s publishing platform allows you to post blogs that will then be shared with the LinkedIn community. Most professionals have already invested a lot of time and energy into their LinkedIn profile and have an established network of contacts. Therefore, posting your blog on LinkedIn Pulse is a great way to leverage the professional network you’ve already built versus starting from scratch – developing a separate blog site and trying to drive people to it. Your audience is already gathered for you on LinkedIn Pulse.
This post was first published by Melissa Drozdowski on Interprose’s blog, Interprose Voice.
So, the SyFy Network just announced a new series that I can’t wait to watch: “The Internet Ruined My Life.” According to SyFy, the show “exposes the unexpected perils of living in a social media obsessed world” and “reveals how people just like you and me inadvertently ruin their lives in one keystroke.”
This post was first published by Brandon Reid on March Communications’ blog M+PR Nonsense.
In the world of social media, it is crucial to stay on top of the latest trends and developments. In fact that is exactly what many social platforms help their users do, by providing news, information, and content in a shareable, condensed format.
Twitter specifically has come to be considered as a news source in its own right, even if the real-time news is not always completely accurate. Even so, as the social media site keeps its users up to date on the latest and greatest, Twitter is also known for constantly looking for ways to improve the platform’s functionality and user experience, by utilizing new analytic or algorithmic capabilities.
Unfortunately, Twitter users do not always see these efforts as such an improvement.
While it is fair to say that many Twitter users probably do not handle change well and have no reason to complain about a layout adjustment on a site that they use for free, it seems that recently Twitter has been making changes simply based on what they are capable of doing, rather than what is in the best interest of the platform’s functionality. Read more
This post was first published by Hailey Melamut on March Communications’ blog M+PR Nonsense.
As a self-proclaimed Instagram aficionado (shameless plug to follow me @haileymelamut), I spend more time than I care to admit thinking of aesthetically-pleasing ways to share my day-to-day on social media. Yes, I am that annoying friend who whips out their phone to
With the recent increase in ads on Instagram, the app is becoming a valuable outlet not just for individuals, but brands and marketers as well. All digital marketing channels have a slew of unwritten rules guiding acceptable practices, and Instagram is no exception. Users must follow a certain ‘Instagram etiquette’ if their posts are to be well-‘liked’ – both literally and figuratively. document every last morsel of food at dinner and occasionally stops in the middle of the street to snap a quick pic. But, annoying or not, I am far from alone in my proclivity for Instagram — the platform has 300 million active users, and is actually outpacing Facebook in growth and engagement.
But, with so many filters, editing tools and photo layouts to choose from, deciding what to post on Instagram can be difficult. And, with an average of 70 million photos shared each day, users must post carefully to avoid getting lost in the Instaverse. Luckily, there are a few tried-and-true strategies that can help marketers appeal to their target audiences and foster engagement on Instagram. Read more
This post was first published by Hanah Johnson on March Communications’ blog PR Nonsense.
This time last year, Pew shared that 30 percent of U.S. adults get their news from Facebook. That stat startled many people – is the news and information on Facebook really a sufficient news source for Americans?
For better or worse, Facebook is embracing that role, rolling out a new plan this month to host articles from news organizations like NBC News, BuzzFeed and The New York Times. Facebook Instant Articles will bring more “aesthetic” articles to mobile users, including high res images and geo-tags, as well as faster load times (Facebook is promising 10x speed increases for articles published directly to its platform). Read more
Do website comment sections serve any other purpose than being forums where people can fight anonymously?
We all know what to expect from website comment sections. Depending on who you talk to, they remain our digital society’s deepest cesspools, dankest wastelands, most snark- and shark-infested waters. It’s no mystery why a parade of media outlets have assessed the value of their own comment sections and have come to the conclusion that they’re just no longer worth the trouble. In the last few years, citing “uncivil comments” and a slew of other reasons, many have eliminated comments entirely, including Vox, Reuters, Re/code, Grantland and Popular Science. They allow conversations around their content to take place instead on social media – take a look at how Grantland’s Bill Simmons responds to commenters on a Facebook thread. Read more
This post was first published by Blaise Lucey on March Communications’ blog PR Nonsense.
Google has essentially become the Gamemaker of “The Hunger Games” and every piece of content is a Tribute trying to survive the search environment. With a sweeping change to the search engine’s algorithm, Google can instantly transform promising pastures into volcanic wastelands, burning old search engine optimization (SEO) strategies to ash.
Did you see what that poison fog did to Katniss in “Catching Fire”? That’s what Google can do to the content you’ve tirelessly spent creating and optimizing for search.
That’s left brands in a bind. Google is the only logical choice when you’re trying to build your company’s presence in search. No matter what Bing and Yahoo try to say, Google has about 68 percent of total U.S. search engine share. That number is growing, too, which means the search giant is only getting bigger. Read more