Social Media

Stop! Thief! That may have been the cry until earlier this month when the latest appeals court decision that web scraping doesn’t break anti-trust laws. LinkedIn lost its two-year legal battle with a private company that it had blocked from its site for allegedly stealing publicly available data from its website. How Does It Affect My Organization? The most susceptible organizations appear to be those with memberships and sites that allow access to proprietary information. Web scrapers can sign up, pay a fee, if necessary, and harvest any information available. In addition, any sites that request personal information, from Facebook... Read More >

A global network focused on women in the creative industries, SheSays, has now launched a campaign calling on firms to shift their parental leave and pay benefits for working dads. While the British government introduced a shared parental leave and pay policy in 2015, SheSays says most businesses are focusing on advocating the benefits of parental leave only to mothers, meaning that uptake by fathers has been minimal. This is remarkably out of step with the policy itself: the changes mean both parents are able to share up to 50 weeks leave and 37 weeks of pay between them. Running... Read More >

Use These Tips to Give Your Social Media Strategy a Facelift A company’s social media presence can often be an easy way to create and maintain customer relations. For both digital marketing and public relations professionals alike, a strong social media calendar can take a load of stress and work off the table. But sometimes it’s easy to get stuck in a bit of a content rut. Surely anyone familiar with managing social media knows this struggle all too well. Content is king, but it can certainly be challenging to stay on the creative ball week in and week out.... Read More >

Does Every Business Need a Website or Social Media Presence? Shelly is a public relations professional who works on her own, freelancing for clients and representing businesses whenever the need arises. Formerly an executive director at a popular PR firm, Shelly decided that it was time to strike out on her own and make her own decisions. With decades of experience under her belt and plenty of networking connections on her contact list, Shelly feels confident that she’ll be able to drum up her own client roster fairly quickly. This proves to be true. Soon enough, she finds herself with... Read More >

Vox Staffers are Tweeting their CEO Earlier this month, dozens of Vox Media staffers took to Twitter to share their personal stories about what it has been like to work at the digital media giant. A host of reporters, editors and other staffers addressed their tweets to CEO Jim Bankoff to share how proud they were of their work they had done, and how instrumental the company had been to their careers. They also wrote, however, about chronically low wages (reporters based in Washington DC, for example, can expect a measly salary of $30,000 a year), salary discrepancies, a lack... Read More >

Advertising with Instagram: Getting Started Instagram has quickly proven itself as a valuable asset to startups and small businesses alike. As users of the platform would know, it doesn’t matter how small your audience is; if you use the right hashtags, you’re likely to receive at least a few likes and comments on each post. Furthermore, with a whopping 500 million daily active users, Instagram is an attractive marketing channel for a range of firms in an array of industries. Still, there are some downsides. One of the major challenges with marketing on Instagram is getting your fans from Instagram... Read More >

How Social Media Can Help Brands Improve Customer Service Somehow, somewhere along the line, consumer behavior shifted away from calling a business on the phone to simply pulling up their website or social media on their mobile device. Now, businesses can have a strong presence in a customer’s mind without that person even setting foot outside of their home. This omnipresence can be beneficial, particularly when it comes to customer service. Think of it this way: previously (and, for some businesses, still), a customer had to dial a toll-free number and navigate a tricky series of automated menu options with... Read More >

A Guide to Facebook’s Four Different Ad Types If anything about advertising on Facebook is clear, it is that good creative holds the key to improving your return on investment. Even if you’re working with a killer targeting strategy designed perfectly for the kind of audience you want to reach, if your creative can’t persuade your audience to take action, then generating sales can get very expensive. Even so, with a range of creative formats on Facebook at your disposal, it can be difficult to know which one best serves your marketing strategy. Here are the four different formats to... Read More >

How to Run an Instagram Contest Whether you’re a well-established brand or just getting started, an Instagram contest is an increasingly popular social media strategy - and for good reason. Everyone loves freebies, and Instagram contests prove their mettle time and time again in being able to engage existing followers while drawing in new customers at the same time. When mapping out our Instagram contest, keep in mind the platform’s contest rules. In summary, they assert: ●        You cannot imply that Instagram is affiliated with the contest; ●        You can’t ask users to tag themselves or others in pictures that don’t actually... Read More >

Getting the Most Out of Instagram Hashtags Hashtags have carved an interesting path in the world of social media: starting off on Twitter, they never quite took off on Facebook, and have instead become the backbone of Instagram marketing. Just the mere adding of # symbol to your post can turn any word or phrase into a clickable, followable topic, with the entire Instagram world at your fingertips. After users click on a hashtag, they are taken to all the public posts associated with that hashtag, and are even given the option of following hashtags that interest them. By doing... Read More >