👋 Howdy, y’all — back for another week of what’s happening in the marketing world. The top story — again — is Elon Musk and Twitter. This time, he’s trying to make a bid for a hostile takeover.

This story has dominated the news cycle this week, so we’ll skip any coverage in favor of everything else going on :)

PS: I’m still looking for one more guest author to help with the newsletter for May and early June. Let me know if you’re interested by replying. It doesn’t have to be the same format as the weekly newsletter, and can be anything marketing related :)

Let’s get into it 👇

Social Media & The Creator Economy

• Planning a social media strategy is hard, so might as well learn from people that live and breathe it. Here’s a look at how the team at Later plans their social media content strategy.
• TikTok continues its dominance on social, and brands are finally hiring dedicated roles just for the channel. Here’s how baby registry company BabyList is using TikTok to grow brand awareness.
• According to a new report, Americans now spend nearly as much time streaming user-generated videos on YouTube, TikTok, and other online platforms as they do watching traditional TV. As expected, younger audiences anchor this trend with teenagers spending 56% of their media time with user-created content, vs 22% for those 55 and older.
• If you want to take off on Instagram Reels, taking advantage of trending sounds is clutch. Here’s how to find trending sounds and get ready for your viral moment.
• If you’re still waiting to get started on TikTok, or just wanna up your game, here are 16 of the best tools to help you with your TikTok marketing strategy.

SEO & Content Marketing

• SEMRUSH published their annual State of Search report, which sums up search trends from last year. A few interesting stats: Google rewrites page titles 62% of the time, organic traffic to eCommerce sites was down by 23%, and over 50% of searches were only 1-2 words 😨
• Getting on the first page of Google (organically) is hard, but there are several ways to get there. You don’t always need to be the first article and instead can try to get featured snippets, knowledge panels, and more. Here are some quick tips to get you started doing that.
• Reddit can be a cash-cow for content marketing, and it just got a massive upgrade. This week, the platform added comment search to their search experience. What’s this mean for marketers? Time saved, according to the official post. “With this new capability, users looking for particular discussions or comments on Reddit no longer need to click on several posts and then scroll through what can sometimes be thousands of comments to find threads that are relevant to them. The new feature solves this problem and quickly gives redditors the ability to comment search directly and further refine their searches by searching for comments within specific communities.“
• Creating content is pretty much pointless without distributing it after the fact. Ross Simmonds, content distribution’s number one fan, just put out a Free LinkedIn Course on the subject. Ross’ content is always great, so this course is probably worth attending. Your key learning outcome from the course: how to create a content distribution engine to maximize success.
• Turning your blog post into a FAQ (frequently asked questions) post could be a good way to boost rankings as part of your content strategy. Here’s how to create a FAQ blog post, why you might want to do it, and what kind of results you can expect.

Copywriting, Branding & Advertising

• Papa John’s and Shaq inked a deal worth about $5.6 million, in addition to royalties on sales of his trademark pizza, the Shaq-A-Roni.
• Google Ads video campaigns/ YouTube ads contain some default settings and fine print that can be wasting you a lot of money. Here are the settings to look out for and how to change them.
• Reels might be good for additional engagement on Instagram, but it’s not driver sales from advertisers. They’d rather spend on TikTok.
• Speaking of TikTok ads, the platform’s ad revenue could top $11 billion (!) this year. Which is more than Twitter and Snap’s ad sales combined.
• Haven’t started running TikTok ads yet and want to get a piece of the pie? Here’s how to get started with TikTok Ads, courtesy of Social Media Examiner.
• Studying sales letters is a great way to get better at copywriting. After all, the point of copy is to sell and generate business. Here’s a 12-step sales letter template to help prompt your next writing sprint.

For Fun

• This week, OpenAI released a new AI-powered image generator called DALL-E 2 that can create brand-new images based on any text input. The results are scary good.

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

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