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The Top Three 🏆

The industry’s most important stories today.

🥇 AI DELIVERS BETTER SEO RESULTS

AI + Human = SEO Win: A recent study found that website SEO content generated through a hybrid approach—AI drafting the content and humans editing it—outperforms fully human-written content in search rankings while cutting costs by 91%. more

• Why it works: AI creates SEO content by analyzing top-ranking pages and generating similar, high-performing content.

• The study's researchers recommend using generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini to draft SEO-optimized content, based on top-ranking pages in your niche.

• Afterward, have a human editor refine the tone, readability, and fix any errors to align with your brand voice.

🥈 BLUESKY & X ACTIVATE ‘TIKTOK MODE’

While Tiktok's fate is in the air, both Bluesky and X have launched vertical video feeds to lure short-video content users. more

• Bluesky has added a customizable video feed under the search tab. The platform says that the ability to swipe through a video-only timeline is specific to custom feeds.

• X has started rolling out a “Video Tab” in the U.S., featuring a circular play button in the app's bottom navigation bar.

🥉 INSTAGRAM PAYS TO POACH TIKTOK CREATORS

Instagram is reportedly luring TikTok creators with cash. According to a report from The Information, the platform is taking advantage of TikTok’s absence from app stores by offering creators huge payouts for creators to post Reels exclusively on Instagram. more

• Bonuses range from $10K-$50K per month, requiring creators to share their short-form videos on Instagram before posting them to other platforms, like TikTok.

• A Meta spokesperson confirmed the launch of a Breakthrough Bonus program, letting TikTok creators earn up to $5K over three months for posting Reels on Facebook and Instagram.

• They also noted that TikTok creators will soon be offered content deals to grow their communities on both platforms.

Posting About Diversity: Does it Help or Hurt Your Brand’s Social Media?

The Tuesday Deep-Dive

This week, Tod chats with the author of a scientific study on how social media posts about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) on social media engagement affects engagement. The study analyzed more than three million posts from nearly 300 brands.

Today’s Other News ☑︎

Everything else that matters.

Advertising 📣

• Google Ads now includes a “private search term” category in Performance Max campaigns, covering queries searched by fewer than 50 unique users in the past 90 days. more

• Google has added a new source column to the Performance Max search terms insights report, showing why ads are triggered for specific search categories, displaying search themes, URLs, creative assists, and more. more

  • To see if it’s live in your account, navigate to Campaigns > Insights and reports > Search terms insights section > Search category.

Search 🔍

• ⚔️ SERP wars: First, Microsoft Bing was tricking users into thinking they were using Google. Now, it’s fully just hiding Google search results altogether. When searching “Google” on Bing, results are under a “Promoted by Microsoft” search box. To see them, users need to click “see more.” more

• Google recently confirmed a major change to its system, requiring all users and bots to have JavaScript enabled when searching. This unannounced update caused disruptions in multiple SEO tools, leading to data blackouts last week. more

TikTok 🎵 

• U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order yesterday delaying the enforcement of a TikTok ban for 75 days. The order extends the deadline for ByteDance to sell its stake by preventing penalties on companies like Apple and Google working with TikTok. more

• The newly popular app RedNote seized the opportunity to target TikTok users seeking alternatives, with Xiaohongshu topping the App Store charts last week. The Chinese app ran ads on both the Apple App Store and Google Play, even targeting users searching for TikTok and ByteDance’s Lemon8. more

• Jump scare: Several Facebook users have reported that the platform automatically made them follow Trump. However, when Trump was sworn in yesterday, the official POTUS and White House Facebook pages transferred to his administration, bringing Biden's followers along. more

• Perplexity AI, the search engine startup, recently submitted a bid to ByteDance, proposing to merge with TikTok U.S. Unlike a sale, the merger would let Bytedance investors keep their stakes and bring more video to Perplexity. more

Social Media 📱

• Instagram is launching a new video editing app called Edits to take on TikTok’s CapCut. The app is now available for “preorder" on the iOS App Store. more

• Threads has added a new "Markup" option for re-shared posts, letting users highlight elements or add text to images before reposting. The feature is currently available to select U.S. users. more

Marketing Tool of the Day 🔨

Cool stuff we found on the web (not a paid placement)

This actually looks really smart — and it’s free!

I am constantly saving LinkedIn posts intending to revisit them, but then they end up lost in the abyss. I stumbled upon this free Chrome extension over the weekend that might help us all keep things organized.

The LinkedIn Saved Post extension offers:

• One-Click Save: Save LinkedIn content directly to specific folders.

• Tagging and Labeling: Create and categorize collections to organize saved items your way.

• Custom Collections: Locate saved posts with the search feature.

Might be worth checking out if you spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. 🙂 

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Spotted on Social 🔍

The social web’s best posts in the last 24 hours.

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