||TODAY’S HIGHLIGHTS||

⚡️ Headlines: Facebook crosses 3 billion MAUs, X’s $1k/mo brand verification, Amazon’s AI cloud services, UN wants smartphones banned from schools

⬇️ Deep Dive: Why you need a personal brand (and how to grow it)

⚙️ Things Worth Checking Out: iOS17’s marketing implications, FREE upcoming webinar, Photoshop’s new uncrop feature, hiring help

MARKETING NEWS

⚡️ Today’s Headlines ⚡️

👤 Facebook added 27M users in Q2 and crossed 3Bn MAUs

☁️ Amazon’s testing its AI service with thousands of cloud customers

👀 X is asking brands to spend at least $1k/mo in ads to maintain verification with 50% off through July 31

🏦 SEC considers new limits on gamified trading apps like Robinhood

🎮 Microsoft adds Venmo as a payment option to Xbox

📵 The UN is urging governments to ban smartphones in schools

🏟️ Fanatics launches new live-shopping platform for sports collectables

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TODAY’S DEEP DIVE

You should be working on your personal brand

📰 TL;DR: Imagine being able to increase your brand’s awareness, directly impact sales, and elevate your career all on your own. Well, that’s where a personal brand comes in. You may have heard the term thrown around over the years, but it’s often confused with becoming a content creator or solely for people who work in marketing.

Put so eloquently by SparkToro’s Amanda Natividad, “taking charge of your personal brand is a way to manage your reputation at scale.” Anyone can do it and it’s entirely flexible around your level of commitment. It can be as simple as sharing your latest work achievement on LinkedIn or as thorough as doing a deep dive into a case study on Twitt–*ahem* X.

💡 Insight: Don’t let the intimidation of content creation keep you from building your personal brand. There’s such a large benefit in dedicating your time and creativity to your growth on social platforms – from learning skills to landing a job that may not even be open to applications.

This article also includes some really helpful guardrails for starting out – essentially, don’t act recklessly. But even more, don’t ask for permission. Personal branding is still a concept that many don’t understand until they’ve reaped the benefits.

Get out there, have fun, show off your personality, and boost your company’s presence in the process!

TOOLS & CONTENT

🛠 Things Worth Checking Out 🛠

💫 HIRING - I trust MarketerHire for all my freelance & marketing assistant needs! They will match you with a top 1% marketer who is fully vetted here.

🗓️ WEBINAR - I'll be attending Alex Hormozi's free webinar announcing his new book $100m Leads on August 19th, join me here.

🛋️ iOS 17 - Apple’s upcoming iOS17 is set to remove URL tracking parameters from links in several apps. MarketingDive has detailed the impacts the new software update will have to marketers.

📷 PHOTOSHOP - Adobe Photoshop just launched a new generative AI feature called Generative Expand that lets users ‘uncrop’ images and expand them beyond their original bounds.

🤖 OPENAI - Turns out OpenAI can’t really tell if something was written by an AI. The company has shut down its’ AI classifier tool to decipher human writing from AI due to a low accuracy rate. Yikes.

BECOME A BETTER MARKETER

4 Hours > 4 Years

Wanna level up your marketing skills but don’t want to spend 4 years and $200,000 on a formal marketing degree? Well lucky for you, our Founder @MarketingMax put together a 4-hour crash course on Growth Marketing.

➡️ Growth Marketing 101 is available here!

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