Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

No communication channel is hotter these days than chat apps, but they are also among the hardest for marketers to tap.

To help brands address this opportunity, London-based startup BetterBrand this week announced its initial product, a chat app marketing platform. At the moment, CEO Asaf Amir told me, the platform is available as a managed service, although it will be released as a self-service cloud platform within a couple of months.

He added that it will be the first self-service marketing platform for multiple chat apps that is not tied to a specific industry or platform. Other chat services, he noted, include travel industry chat service Pana, enterprise-focused Kore and Imperson, which is designed for character-based bots on specific apps...

If there is one thing that is constant about social media platforms (besides their URLs), it is that they change fast. There are some recently released social media tools that communication and marketing professionals may find very helpful…or at least find good to know about.

In this post I want to take a look at some new tools that are available for the more prominent social media platforms and give an idea of how they can be helpful for PR professionals and marketers....

Our brain has the ability to be able to process images 60,000 faster than it can text. So the use of visual content is vital as it helps to draw your audience in further.

Using the right images means that readers are more likely to engage, like or share.It therefore goes without saying that when it comes to social media marketing, the use of images or graphics is a must do strategy.  

Most people shy away from using images as they don’t think they have the skills to create stunning shareable images . The good news is that there are plenty of online tools that you can use that will allow you to create great images.  These tools will help you to create professional eye catching visual content that can be used on twitter , facebook, instagram etc.

Below are 10 of the best tools that you can use to create some amazing social media images....

Newsreader app Guide is no more… well, at least in its current form.

The company that once aimed to help consumers better digest the news with a video channel of websites read by its lovable avatars has been reborn as a service for publishers. It’s still focused on the news, but has evolved into a platform that provides online sites with inexpensive quality videos, which may have been originally thought of as being too far out of reach. The new service launches today.

What publishers receive from the reborn Guide is technology that will turn any news article, like the one you’re reading now, into a video. The company says that its process will “auto-generate” multimedia videos in a way that is “inexpensive, fast, and at scale.” Prior to launch, the service had already been in use on 270 sites. Guide claims that the average click to play rate was 19 percent, while the average completion rate was 47.8 percent.

Guide intends to monetize its service through standard fees for voice-over work and advertising inserted into videos placed on a publisher’s website. In addition, it will license its technology through a SaaS offering where publishers can pay per video and on a CPM rate....