📰 Growth Daily - Tuesday, Jan 24

Today's news, tips, & tools you need to know

January 24, 2023

1 - ChatGPT Teases A $42/mo Pro Plan With Perks

📰 TL;DR - Some power users of ChatGPT have spotted a new $42/mo "Professional Plan" option that includes:

+ Priority access when the tool is in high demand and their servers are overloaded+ Faster response speed+ Priority access to new features as they become available

💡 Insight - It was only a matter of time before their parent company OpenAI decided to monetize the viral sensation that is ChatGPT. We think the pricing seems pretty fair given that many of the "competitors" are priced between $20/mo and $90/mo, $42 seems pretty realistic. We are just excited to learn more about these new features :) 

2 - There Really Are "Algorithm Gods"

📰 TL;DR - News recently broke that Tik Tok has a secret "heating" button that can make any video go viral, giving certain employees god-level algorithm power. Internal documents show that staff members secretly hand-pick specific videos to "supercharge" distribution known internally as "heating" ...

“The heating feature refers to boosting videos into the For You feed through operation intervention to achieve a certain number of video views,” an internal TikTok document titled MINT Heating Playbook explains. “The total video views of heated videos accounts for a large portion of the daily total video views, around 1-2%, which can have a significant impact on overall core metrics.”

💡 Insight - We knew the game was never fully fair and equal for everyone but WOW. To see this confirmed from internal documents is really crazy. It makes us wonder if other platforms have similar capabilities. And as marketers it makes us really question what exactly do these internal staffers look for to get them to add some "heat" to our videos?

3 - Later.com's 5 Instagram Growth Hacks

📰 TL;DR - We trust Later's blog (even though they don't pay us to promote it) because they use data collected from their many users to provide real actionable free insights! Most of the "growth hacks" in the list of 5 are simple and boring but two really stood out to us:

  1. Optimize Keywords for SEO - About 40% of Gen Z prefers Instagram & Tik Tok as their go-to search engines so this is a no brainer growth hack. You should be spending time optimizing your hashtags and captions to make sure your post is optimized to show up for hyper relevant and low volume keywords

  2. Use analytics - This is one of those "growth hacks" that everyone knows to do but rarely does... Calendar block 15 minutes every week to comb through your Instagram Insights inside the app and see if you glean any patterns between your most engaged posts and the time of posting, the hashtags, the topic, or anything!

4 - Tik Tok Testing Podcasts?

📰 TL;DR - Not exactly... they are testing a new feature that would let users listen to Tik Toks without having the app open, kind of like how you can play music on Spotify or apple music, turn off the screen of your phone, and still keep listening... They are just calling the feature "Podcasts" which doesn't seem quite right. 

💡 Insight - We aren't sure if this will catch on since most people don't consume Tik Toks just for the audio but we are optimistic that this could be the sign of something to come because we are desperately waiting for a new podcast platform to come to market. Podcast operations and data are in desperate need of an upgrade! There's no data around who is listening, for how long, and no ability to insert ads and get data on the ad performance or targeting. Could Tik Tok be the ones to make it happen?

5 - Meta Changing Up Some Of Its Terminology

📰 TL;DR - Meta is changing the short word "people" in it's performance metrics with the longer phrase "Account Center accounts" or to explain this in their own words:

“... if a person has one Facebook account and one Instagram account that are linked, they will be counted as one Account Center account.”

💡 Insight - Even though they are getting rid of the word "people" ... we guess this will help give advertisers managing Facebook ad campaigns more clarity into just exactly how many "people" they are actually reaching with their ads. Helpful, but not vital!

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