In The Thursday Three with Pushkin PR we share three news stories that captivated our attention during the week ranging from public relations and social media trend updates to relevant news in the industries we serve including healthcare, nonprofits, government, law firms, and festival clients.
Social Media: Private Instagram Accounts for Brands
Hootsuite: 5 Reasons Why Brands are Using Private Instagram Accounts
One of the trends we’ve seen lately in social media is brands taking their Instagram accounts private. The trend appears to have roots in the meme account space with accounts that share memes requiring users to follow the account before being able to see their posts. The practice has filtered into mainstream brands with companies like Everlane employing private accounts for new product launches.
This article reports that several brands have seen massive increases in follower growth by taking their accounts private and the results make sense. Think about it this way: when a friend sends you a post, you want to take a look at it, right? With a traditional account you might view the post and like it but you don’t have to follow the original account in order to see the post. With private accounts, users are required to follow the original account before they can see posts shared from private accounts by friends. When you’re posting highly shareable content and looking to increase your follower count, consider turning to a private account temporarily or for a longer-term campaign!
SEO: How to Boost Your Website’s SEO Rankings
PR Daily: 3 ways to drive better SEO results for any website
Maintaining your spot at the top of search engine rankings is vital to ensuring your brand retains visibility and reaches news leads. For many of our clients, developing an SEO strategy can feel overwhelming without the proper training and knowledge of best practices. We often recommend working with a firm to conduct an SEO audit to address areas for potential growth and ways to boost your site’s rankings.
If you’re managing SEO on your own, this article has a few great tips of where to get started. As we always say, content is king. One of the best things you can do to quickly boost your site’s SEO ranking is to develop a company blog and, you guessed it, update it regularly. Make sure that the topics you’re writing about are of interest to your target audience to help your rankings increase as quickly as possible. If you’re stuck trying to figure out what topic to write about, Answer the Public is one of our team’s favorite places to start searching for blog topics!
Public Relations: How to Pitch Journalists The Right Way
Muck Rack: 3 lessons learned from analyzing journalist feedback for a year
When you hire a public relations firm to help share your story with the media, one of the perks is our relationships with journalists. Over the years we’ve worked hard to cultivate working relationships with members of the media and learn about their specific beats. As a result, we are able to identify the proper journalist to pitch a story to, along with the best angle.
If you’re launching a public relations campaign but don’t have standing relationships with members of the media, this article has several great tips to make sure that your pitch resonates.
One of our favorite tips in this article is making sure that you always have an expert available after sending out a pitch. This is one of the complaints we hear most often from the reporters we work with. There’s nothing worse than sending out a pitch, getting a positive response from an interested journalist but then not being able to place the story because you don’t have an expert available for an interview.