The Holiday Season, it’s the “most wonderful time of the year” and a tremendous opportunity to amplify your public relations connections and opportunities. Here are a few timely reminders to help you make the most out of this holiday season.

For many reasons this time of year, people are tempted to back off their proactive PR communication. Too many people set their content on autopilot and just hope for the best. This is exactly the wrong approach. This time of year, emotions are high and people are looking for reasons to smile. You and your brand have the opportunity to be one of those reasons. Take advantage of opportunities to connect, internally and externally, to build brand loyalty.

Call To Action, or CTA, is a key part of your marketing strategy – it’s the part where you tell your target audience what action they should take after arriving at your landing page or reading through your blog post. The most basic CTAs would involve encouraging the customer to buy your product or service. Other types of CTA involve asking your reader to share your content, make a donation, subscribe to your emails, and so forth.

Creating content without an effective CTA is a lost opportunity to encourage your audience to be a supporter, follower or buyer of your brand. A CTA is what turns marketing into active engagement and hopefully, profits. Here are some tips to create a call to action to get the best results:

Social Media has become a staple for PR professionals. Through social media, PR teams can engage with audiences and respond to crisis in real time, drive consumer spending, and build a loyal follower base.

While social media has changed the landscape of PR with its impressive capabilities, the question now arises – how do we measure your digital efforts to understand ROI? This is important to understand if the efforts you’re putting into social media is influencing the community, as well to demonstrate this information to the C-suite.

Influencer marketing campaigns are making waves as a marketing strategy since it provides third party credibility and brand awareness to the right audiences. An influencer can enhance a brand’s visibility and social reach, usually beyond the capabilities of traditional media outlets.

Tapping into influencer marketing requires some planning and dollars so it’s important that our influencers are making a positive impact on the brand in terms of return on investment. It’s impossible to determine if your influencer marketing campaign is actually improving your business if you’re not measuring the effective of the campaign. Here are some tools to help keep track of how successful your influencer marketing campaign is:

Social media PR can be a moving target. Rules and guidelines change, algorithms shift, and consumer moods can turn on a dime. Taken together, it can feel daunting to product a series of campaigns that consistently wins. But it doesn’t have to be. Consider these tried and true social media PR strategies, and you can find balance, even as the social corner of cyberspace continues to shift.

Don’t be afraid to share your hobbies, interests, or passions. While you should take care in how your messages may be perceived, the big benefit of social media is that it humanizes big brands and brings celebrities closer than ever to their fans, while still providing necessary separation to protect your privacy. Well-handled, you could leverage your interests to create deeper bonds with your fans and your customers. A casual conversation about a shared interest could be the push that turns a customer into a dedicated fan.

The rise of the Influencer cannot be overstated, and Influencer Marketing can be your firm’s best secret weapon. Still, as with any industry, the world of influencers is not immune to fraudsters. Here’s five ways to tell if your future Influencer is really more of a follower.

Commit this formula to memory:

Social media giant Snapchat is now introducing a new series of lenses to their platform that can respond to voice commands. The audio lenses will animate automatically when users speak simple words like “yes”, “love”, “no”, and “hi”. This is an alteration on previous filters that respond to physical actions that users take on camera like opening their mouths or winking.

For instance, if a customer says “hi” using the new audio lenses, Snapchat will automatically launch an application that surround them with a flock of birds. On the other hand, if a user says “no” they are placed in an infinite tunnel of photos, while if they say “yes”, the Snapchat filter will zoom in on the user’s face.