👋 What’s up, everyone! Back in your inbox with the last newsletter of March. The big story of the week is that we finally have chronological IG feeds back!

Thank you all again for being here with me each week! We keep adding subscribers and to me, it’s the most amazing thing considering it’s almost the one-year anniversary of the newsletter.

You can help me grow by sharing the newsletter to a friend, or supporting with a membership.

And with that, here’s this week’s roundup 👇

Social Media & The Creator Economy

• Instagram launched two new chronological views to the home feed. The update splits your feed into three options: “Home” (the current default feed with personalized content), “Following” (a pure chronological feed), & “Favorites” (a chronological feed from a curated list of your favorite accounts). That’s a lot to take in, but Later’s got you covered with the details.
• This week, Snap acquired a company called NextMind for an undisclosed amount of money. That company is best for its checks notes mind-controlled headband. Alrighty then.
• There are one billion daily active users on Instagram. Ever wondered what the demographic makeup of all those users is? Hootsuite’s got us covered with their latest report. There are many insights on age, location, income, etc.
• Twitter officially turned 15 this week (whut). Here’s former CEO Jack Dorsey’s very first tweet, which he would later sell as an NFT for $2.9 million.
• LinkedIn rolled out a few updates this week designed to boost organic visibility of company pages. Included in the list are new industry categories, and newsletters for companies. The latter feature sends notifications to subscribers when you publish a new issue. This is great if you run a company page since it gives an alternative to LinkedIn ads, which are notoriously expensive.
• Twitter is testing analytics for its Spaces feature. The goal is to show hosts the number of tune-ins, speakers, replays and more. Spaces is still eating Clubhouse’s lunch, with no signs of slowing down.
• YouTube is now streaming TV shows for free (they’re ad-supported, so don’t get too excited). That last note about ads is what makes this so important. It gives YouTube another opportunity to place contextually relevant ads (I hate that I typed that phrase, am I corporate now?)

SEO & Content Marketing

• Google published an algorithm update to improve the quality of reviews that it displays within search results. Google now looks through reviews and evaluates them against a list of criteria. The goal, of course, is to make the search results better for us all.
• Simply creating content won’t make it last forever. You need to repurpose it and redistribute it to extend its reach and lifespan. There’s a new complete guide to repurposing content over on the ahrefs blog to help you get the most mileage out of your next piece.
• Blog posts aren’t the only type of content you should be creating if your goal is to get rankings. The RankMakers newsletter has a great actionable tip this week on using knowledge bases to generate traffic.
• Google admitted this week that AI-generated content still isn’t high-quality enough to rank. This is interesting given the explosion of AI content creation tools that have popped up over the last two years. Opinion: it’s only a matter of time before these tools get good at producing reasonable content.
• I’m always getting asked about where to learn more about SEO. There are tons of great resources, but also so much snake oil! Here’s a great course from the ahrefs blog which teaches you about blogging for business. Blogging and content marketing is a staple of SEO, so if you can master these concepts, you’ll be on your way to success.

Copywriting, Branding & Advertising

• The Oscars are airing tonight (Sunday) and all ad slots are sold out. The average price for a 30-second spot was about $1.7 million. Of course, there’s a crypto.com ad this year — in case you thought you’d get by without seeing one of those.
• On a related note, the NFL is now allowing blockchain sponsorships, but with a catch: sponsor brands can’t be described as “crypto” partners. Stigma, much?
• This HBR article makes the case that it’s ok to praise your competition. According to new research, praising competitors makes brands seem more thoughtful, kind, and trustworthy, ultimately making consumers more likely to buy their products.
• It’s the seventh year of Take Some Risk’s annual survey of ppc marketers and their salaries. Salaries this year range from $47K to $139K, depending on a few variables. Get that bag. 💰
• Retargeting is a staple of any advertising program, especially in PPC. Wordstream put together 10 tips to help everyone get more out of their retargeting campaigns. Even if you’re not running ppc, this is a good primer on the possibilities of what you can get out of your Google Ads account.

For Fun

• Why is “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” so popular and so catchy? It’s not just because your kids played it back to back 62 times. Here’s a breakdown on why it became a hit song.

Woo! You made it to the end. Thank you so much for being here for another week.

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