We couldn’t not address the elephant in the room this week: the Kate Middleton Photoshop conspiracies. Are you deep into the black hole of theories too? Give us your wildest ones… 👀

🧠 Stat Of The Day 🧠

X experienced a 30% drop in usage from 2023 to 2024. (Source: Edison Research)

💰 Landing Pages, Every Single Month

The 7-figure DTC landing page process: Customer Research, wireframing, copywriting, design, development, launch, measure, iterate, rinse & repeat.

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⚡️Today’s Headlines⚡️

🌎 Google Ads limits number of country-level exclusions to 120

🚫 Everything you need to know about the potential U.S. TikTok ban

🤖 Elon Musk’s xAI is open sourcing its chatbot Grok this week

🔎 Threads’ search trends showcased a lot of politics this week

👀 Apple’s testing an AI-powered ad competitor to Google’s PMax

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🛠️ Things Worth Checking Out 🛠️

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🦾 AI MARKETING - OpenAI Founder Sam Altman was recently quoted as saying, “95% of what marketers use agencies, strategists, and creative professionals for today will easily be handled by AI.” Thoughts?

✨ Today’s Insight ✨

Don’t ignore dark social media

📰 TL;DR - Dark social media – channels where content is shared privately, like Facebook groups, Instagram DMs, or WhatsApp messages – is a marketing opportunity not to be missed. According to research, marketers say that nearly half of their brand’s web traffic can be attributed to dark social channels. SmartBrief and Capterra dove into a few ways you can optimize content and track dark social media activities.

💡 Insight - Tailor content for niche, specific audiences. The more targeted, the better. Generalized, broad messages might reach a wide audience, but you want to lean into the content that deeply resonates with a specific consumer.

Use links to track content and sharing behaviors. You should always have UTM parameters and use link shorteners to make sharing easy an simple to track where users are coming from.

Understand where most dark social media activity occurs. The research shows 68% of marketers believe the highest ocurrence happens in private social media groups, with 62% believing this happens in private Facebook or Instagram messages.

Optimize your analytics tracking for these activities. Ensure you understand where your traffic is coming from and follow strong data hygiene tips. When in doubt, use more simple forms of data to measure these channels like audience polling or referral programs.

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