||TODAY’S HIGHLIGHTS||

⚡️ Headlines: Spotify’s Premium price hike, Cloudflare’s trending domains, Mastodon’s 2.1M MAUs, Threads’ new feed

⬇️ Deep Dive: How not to rebrand a major company (aka what to learn from ‘X’)

⚙️ Things Worth Checking Out: My hiring secret, free SEO audit, mixing brain cells & AI, Sprout’s 2023 State of Social report

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MARKETING NEWS

⚡️ Today’s Headlines ⚡️

🎵 Spotify’s rising its premium plan price to $10.99/mo in the U.S.

🥇 Find today’s trending domains via Cloudflare’s new feature

🔥 Mastodon reaches 2.1M monthly active users after X rebrand

🤔 Study finds brands get more reach on IG but more engagement on TikTok

💰 Instagram expands creator subscriptions program to new regions

🧵 Threads is finally rolling out a ‘Following’ feed

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TODAY’S DEEP DIVE

How not to rebrand a major company, as taught by X

📰 TL;DR: Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or not reading this newsletter for the past few days), you’ve likely heard about Elon Musk’s seemingly impromptu decision to rebrand Twitter to ‘X’ with a new logo already in place.

Rebranding a social network with over 368M MAUs is… a choice. But even those who agree with the decision are noting the chaotic launch of this new brand. The Twitter culture has been around for over 10 years and includes its own dictionary of terms – tweeting, tweeps, tweets. With a half-transitioned platform and little to no strategic reasoning behind the change, users are left questioning – is this the end of Twitter?

💡 Insight: Strategy still matters. It’s easy to get lost in strategic planning and often dwell on things that don’t really matter that much. But even the aligning on things in the background like a mission, vision, goals, and objectives serves a greater purpose.

The X rebrand feels chaotic because it seems to lack that strategic planning. Of course I’m just speculating here, but if strategic planning happened, we probably wouldn’t still have half the buttons on the site pointing us to “tweet” or reply to @Twitter.

Whether or not they know why it’s happening, your audience can tell when something is off-brand or haphazardly done. Don’t skip the deep work. It truly serves a purpose and helps you build something that will stand the test of time and helps your audience take you seriously.

TOOLS & CONTENT

🛠 Things Worth Checking Out 🛠

🌟 HIRING - Looking for top 1% marketing talent? I trust MarketerHire for all my freelance & marketing assistant needs! Learn more here.

🔎 SEO - Take advantage of BREEZY SEO's limited time free 7-day trial of their affordable & effective SEO service to help you get more high-intent google traffic here.

🧠 AI BIOLOGY - Scientists in Australia are working on ways to merge human brain cells with AI. The innovation could be used for new machine learning frontiers… or the classic nightmare scenario of an AI uprising. TBD.

🗞️ SOCIAL MEDIA - Sprout Social and The Harris Poll surveyed 750+ leaders in marketing for their 2023 State of Social Media report. 97% of leaders agree AI & ML will provide better social media data & analysis.

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