Today's Guide to the Marketing Jungle from Social Media Examiner...
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The weekend is almost here, Alluser! Here's a recap of the most important insights, trends, and updates from the week. Catch up in minutes and go into next week prepared.

In today's edition:

You need to check your bid settings on LinkedIn, right now
Research-backed Instagram frequency recommendations
Facebook just pulled the plug on group chats. Now what?
A step-by-step framework to use emotional targeting in your content
5 ways AI is affecting marketers' ability to reach and convert customers
YouTube Updates: Collaboration Tools, A/B Title Testing, Shorts Features, and More
AI tool stacks for KPI reporting at beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels
5 ChatGPT secret features 99% of users don't know about
🗞️ Industry news from Claude, LinkedIn, TikTok, and more

The LinkedIn Ad Setting That Could Tank Your ROI

Are you targeting a small audience on LinkedIn? Are your LinkedIn campaigns burning money faster than you can earn it?

AJ Wilcox recently reviewed a client's campaign and he's sharing what he found behind the scenes plus how to stop it, so you don't spend thousands for a single lead.

You'll find out how automated bidding can go spectacularly wrong when audience size and budget expectations collide in the worst possible way. Read more here.

How Often Should You Really Post on Instagram in 2025?

Buffer's new analysis from over 2 million posts reveals exactly how often small businesses and creators should be showing up to increase reach and gain followers—without overextending themselves.

Curious if 3–5 posts a week could double your growth? Wondering whether posting 10+ times is worth the effort? The answers are all here, backed by real numbers—and written for marketers who want to grow smart, not just fast.

The data points to a clear sweet spot that balances consistency with quality. Even small shifts in how often you post can have a measurable impact on performance. Whether you're maintaining momentum or looking to scale, knowing where the returns start to level off can help you plan smarter. Read more here.

Facebook Groups Strategy Shift

Starting next week, Community Chats in Facebook Groups are officially being retired. In their place? Messenger Communities—a shift that could reshape how marketers and small business owners connect with audiences in real time.

If you've built engagement or support channels inside your Facebook Group, this change isn't just cosmetic. It may impact how you organize group interactions, moderate conversations, or even drive traffic to offers and content.

The question now: Is Messenger Communities a worthy replacement—or a step backward for community-driven marketing?

Whether you're running a niche group, a paid membership, or a customer support hub, it's worth understanding how this update could shift your workflow.

Mari Smith and her community are discussing what this means for your strategy—and what to consider before making the switch. Follow the conversation here.

Is AI Leaving You Behind?

Are you unsure where to start with AI? Or are you already using it, but know you could be doing so much more?

Here's the truth: you don't need to master everything with AI. You just need to know your next few steps.

Take our free 3-minute assessment to reveal your AI marketing readiness level and get a 30-day action plan for success.

Are you an Observer, Experimenter, Optimizer, or Transformer? Find out in just a few minutes and get specific next steps based on where you are today. No generic advice, no overwhelming tech speak – just actionable guidance in plain English that you can start using TODAY.

Yes. I'm ready to take my free assessment.

Emotional Targeting: A Proven Path to More Leads and Sales

The first step in emotional targeting is research, and Talia Wolf emphasizes that this work takes time. It's not a bandage, an easy fix, a tactic, or a hack. This work requires meaningful investment, but if you do it properly, you'll unravel something you can use forever.

The goal is to uncover the top three pains that led people to your website, the top three desired outcomes and emotional outcomes they're looking for, understanding how they feel right now, and understanding how they want to feel in the future once they've found a solution.

To begin, you need to understand your customers' emotional motivations.

Through years of experience, Wolf and her team have identified over 223 different emotional triggers. However, these emotions typically fall into clusters.

The Self-Image Cluster: The first cluster is all about how someone wants to feel about themselves after finding a solution. They want to feel pride. They want to feel smart. They want to feel that they are a better mom, a better marketer, a better version of themselves. This is all related to self-image.

The Social Image Cluster: This second cluster usually comes hand in hand with self-image, especially if you're a service provider or in B2B. Social image is all about how someone wants others to think about or see them after they have a solution. For example, they want other people to think of them as the go-to person in the office. They want other people to think they deserve that promotion. They want people to think that they're smart, that they're a leader, that they're a great mom.

When you start researching, you'll begin noticing when people talk about how they want to feel about themselves versus when they mention other people. They're mentioning people in the office, their neighbor, and significant others in the conversation.

When you start seeing those patterns, you can develop hypotheses about whether your prospects care about their self-image or their social image.

Research Methods That Work

You can conduct several types of research to uncover these emotional drivers.

Customer surveys allow you to directly ask your existing customers about their experiences, but these should focus on emotional drivers rather than feature preferences.

Visitor surveys are tools on your website to capture insights from people who are currently in your funnel but haven't converted.

Social listening involves being a fly on the wall in conversations where your prospects naturally discuss their challenges and desires.

Review mining is one of Wolf's favorite research methods. If you don't have a lot of customers to interview or survey right now, review mining means going to your competitors' products and seeing their reviews. But it's not just your competitors—you can also look at related products on Amazon.

For example, if you're selling courses for training your dog at home, you could go to Amazon and look for books about training dogs because your prospects are probably also learning from books if they want to do their own dog training. If you have accounting software, you could look at reviews for "Accounting for Dummies."

The key is to mine through hundreds of reviews that these books or your competitors are getting to see what people are complaining about, what people love, and what people are missing. You want to see comments like "I wish this book would cover X," " This book didn't really get into this piece, which I'm really missing," or "This book nailed this piece."

When you do this research, you start seeing different ways you can outsmart your competitors and different ways you can talk about your solution. You'll suddenly see that people care about specific things, and you might have a feature that addresses those concerns. You should be talking about this because people care about it.

Review sites exist for almost everything you could imagine. Amazon works for books and physical products. TripAdvisor works for travel services. G2 and works for bigger software products. The key is finding where your prospects are already having conversations about solutions like yours.

How to Use AI for Research Analysis

One of the most powerful applications of AI in this process is analyzing the research you've collected. Depending on the project, Wolf and her team download all of their research and upload it into Perplexity, Claude, or ChatGPT.

They ask the AI to look for specific things. For example, they might say, "Put this information into two buckets: self-image and social image." They pre-feed the AI with definitions of social image and self-image and ask it to categorize the research accordingly.

Other useful prompts include asking AI to "put it into negative and positive," "shine a light on all the conversations and reviews that mention other people," or "highlight all the conversations and reviews that mention X."

If you go in with basic demographic information like age, geographical location, gender, browser, and job title and ask ChatGPT to write great copy, it will be generic and boring.

But if you pour 200 reviews from a book into your AI project and say, "Here's what I need you to do. Dissect this. Tell me about [specific emotional drivers]," then you can get incredible copy because you're feeding it with incredible and golden insights.

Reinventing Work: How AI is Transforming Everything

The way people discover and consume information is shifting dramatically, requiring businesses to completely rethink their systems and approaches to reaching customers.

Here are five ways AI is affecting the work of marketers and business owners right now.

From Search to Contextual Discovery

For decades, Google has functioned as a massive database catalog of information. Users learned to structure keyword searches to receive lists of potential responses, then manually sorted through ten-page listings to find answers to their questions. AI's ability to provide contextual, synthesized responses is disrupting this entire system.

Cole illustrates this shift with a personal example: "I have very curly hair, and so I might ask for advice on helping me find a moisturizing shampoo and conditioner. If I type that search into Google, I would get a list of people who paid for those keywords and then people who probably have some content related to those keywords. But I would have to go and figure out for myself which is the best response."

With ChatGPT and similar AI tools, users now receive answers with explanations, context about why specific products are recommended, and even warnings about products to avoid based on customer reviews. This represents a fundamental shift from user-driven discovery to agent-mediated discovery.

The Disintermediation of Brand Control

This transformation creates disintermediation—businesses no longer own the search experience. How companies tell their stories, build their brands, and invest in keyword strategies is being disrupted by AI agents that control how brands appear to consumers and in what priority order.

"We're calling this disintermediation. So you are no longer owning that search experience. How you tell that story, the way that you brand it, and how much you pay for the keywords are being disrupted by what's happening on the consumer experience side," Cole explains.

This shift forces businesses to reconsider their fundamental approach to customer connection. Instead of optimizing for search algorithms and keyword rankings, companies must think about creating value, building relationships, and connecting with customers in a world where AI agents mediate these interactions.

From Content Marketing to Context Marketing

Traditional content marketing focused on creating content optimized for searches, hoping to appear when people looked for solutions to specific problems. Context marketing represents a fundamental shift in this approach.

In a context-driven world, businesses must be prepared to reassemble real-time content pieces to answer any customer question. Instead of creating static content for predetermined search queries, companies need flexible content components that AI can dynamically combine to provide personalized, contextual responses.

Cole envisions a future where, instead of navigating a pre-constructed website with fixed navigation, customers can build their own experiences by describing what they're looking for and the problems they're trying to solve. Companies would then create digital experiences tailored to individual customer contexts and needs.

The Changing Role of Websites

While websites may seem less important in an AI-mediated world, they're becoming more crucial. Websites now serve less as discovery mechanisms and more as validation and decision-making tools.

The process has shifted: AI helps with initial research and recommendations, but humans still want to visit websites to confirm decisions, especially for complex or high-value purchases. Websites are evolving from broad discovery tools to focused conversion and credibility instruments.

Additionally, AI agents actively crawl and analyze website content to inform their recommendations. This means websites must be optimized for AI consumption and understanding, not just human navigation and search engine rankings. The content must be structured and comprehensive enough for AI agents to accurately represent the business in recommendations.

The Growing Importance of User-Generated Content

In an AI-driven discovery world, user reviews, customer testimonials, and user-generated content on platforms like Quora and Reddit become increasingly important. These authentic, user-driven content sources serve as critical feedback loops for AI agents making recommendations.

"I think it becomes about a focus less on brand-initiated content creation, and really on activating customers to be advocates and speak on our behalf," Cole explains. While marketers have always known that customer advocacy provides the most valuable opportunities, controlling and systematizing it has been difficult. In an AI-mediated world, customer advocacy becomes even more critical for business success.

Businesses must shift focus from creating promotional content to inspiring and enabling customers to share authentic experiences and recommendations. This requires developing programs and strategies that encourage genuine customer advocacy rather than traditional marketing content creation.

Test and Compare Titles with A/B Testing

YouTube has introduced A/B title testing, expanding beyond the existing thumbnail testing feature that creators have been using for some time. This new capability allows creators to test two different titles for the same video and measure which performs better based on actual viewer data.

The title testing feature works exactly like the current thumbnail testing system. You can upload two different titles for the same video, and YouTube will automatically split your audience to show each title to different viewers. The platform then measures what percentage of views came from each title variation and allows you to either let the system pick the winner automatically or manually select which title you want to keep.

This feature addresses a common anxiety many creators face when uploading content. As Jessica explains, "Every time I upload, I'm like, all right, search title or click title search." The decision between creating a keyword-heavy title for search optimization versus a more engaging, clickable title has been a persistent challenge. With A/B testing, creators can now test both approaches simultaneously.

The testing system measures success based on watch time, similar to thumbnail testing, rather than click-through rates. While some creators might prefer click-through rate as a metric since it more directly measures the effectiveness of the title itself, YouTube's focus on watch time aligns with their broader business model of keeping viewers on the platform longer.

This capability eliminates the need to choose between search-optimized titles and engagement-focused titles during the upload process. Instead of making an educated guess about which approach will work better, creators can test both variations and let the data determine the winner. The feature represents a significant step forward in making content optimization more scientific and less dependent on intuition.

For businesses and marketers, this means you can test different messaging approaches, keyword strategies, and value propositions within your titles to see what resonates most with your target audience. The ability to test titles removes much of the guesswork from content strategy and provides concrete data about what language and approaches work best for your specific audience.

Enhanced Audience Segmentation Tools

YouTube is introducing more sophisticated audience segmentation categories that go beyond the traditional "new" and "returning" viewer classifications. The enhanced system will include "casual viewers" who watched content for one to five months out of the past twelve months, and "regular viewers" who watched for six months or more during that same period.

The "regular viewers" category will replace the current "returning viewers" metric, providing more granular insight into audience loyalty and engagement patterns. This change allows creators to better understand not just whether someone has watched their content before, but how consistently they engage with the channel over time.

These new categories address a significant limitation in YouTube's current analytics where the "returning" designation could apply to someone who watched two videos ever or someone who watches every upload. The enhanced segmentation provides much more meaningful insight into actual audience behavior and loyalty levels.

Jessica highlights the value of being able to categorize new viewers more precisely, noting that you can actually examine different levels of "newness" within the new viewer category. This granular analysis helps creators understand their audience development patterns and identify which types of content successfully convert new viewers into regular followers.

For businesses, these enhanced segmentation tools provide better insight into customer loyalty and engagement cycles. Rather than simply knowing that someone is a returning visitor, marketers can now understand whether they represent a casual browser or a highly engaged prospect who consistently consumes their content.

The new segmentation particularly benefits businesses with longer sales cycles where the relationship between first contact and conversion might span many months. Understanding whether viewers are developing into regular audience members helps predict potential customer lifetime value and informs content strategy decisions.

The enhanced analytics also provide better insight into content performance across different audience segments. Creators can analyze whether certain types of content better appeal to casual viewers versus regular viewers, helping them optimize their content mix for different audience development goals.

This segmentation improvement aligns with YouTube's broader shift away from subscriber counts toward more meaningful engagement metrics. The platform increasingly recognizes that a smaller audience of highly engaged viewers often provides more value than a large audience of casual subscribers who rarely engage with new content.

More Features, Tools, Changes, and Updates Discussed Include:

YouTube Collaboration Feature
Channel Insights Sharing for Brand Partnerships
Updated Monetization Rules Around Profanity
AI-Powered Age Protection and Verification
Advanced Analytics Mode Redesign
Ask Studio AI Analytics Assistant
Generative AI Tools for YouTube Shorts
Sync Imported Shorts to Music
Expanded Feature Rollouts Across Regions
Maximizing These YouTube Updates for Your Content Strategy

Watch it on YouTube

Using AI in Your KPI Reporting

AI can crunch numbers and spot patterns faster than any spreadsheet—but if you're asking it to "analyze your KPIs," you're probably missing the mark. This Trust Insights post from Katie Robbert and Chris Penn reframes how to use AI in performance analysis.

You'll learn how to align the right AI tools with your real goals, streamline reporting with smarter processes, and avoid over-engineering platforms you don't need yet.

Whether you're still exporting CSVs or dabbling with predictive models, this post walks you through how to get results without getting overwhelmed. And yes—ChatGPT can play a meaningful role if you give it the right job. Read more here.

5 Hidden ChatGPT Features for Marketers

Many marketers are stuck in first gear—typing a prompt, copying the answer, and calling it a day. But the ones quietly transforming their workflows? They're using ChatGPT to deliver competitor reports, schedule daily insights, and even analyze their screens in real time.

In this walkthrough, we reveal five advanced ChatGPT features that most marketers scroll right past. No code required. You'll learn how to:

Edit prompts like a pro (without cluttering your thread)
Pull live data into your strategy, from news to market trends
Automate recurring tasks—yes, even while you sleep
Use your camera to "show" ChatGPT exactly what you're working on
Protect sensitive projects with temporary, memory-free chats

Watch more here.

OpenAI debuts GPT‑5: OpenAI has launched GPT‑5, positioning it as their most advanced model yet, equipped to tackle complex tasks—from coding and writing to health advice and visual reasoning—via a smart router that selects between quick answers and deeper "thinking" responses. The higher-tier GPT‑5 pro option promises extended reasoning power for expert-level performance. Across benchmarks, GPT‑5 delivers substantial improvements in accuracy, honesty, and reduced bias or flattery, while introducing four personality presets—Cynic, Robot, Listener, and Nerd—to tailor conversation style. The rollout began on August 7, 2025, offering access to Free, Plus, Pro, and Team users, with Enterprise and Education versions to follow. OpenAI

Google Responds to Concerns About AI Search Effects on Traffic: Despite rising concerns, Google confirms that the volume of organic traffic from Search to websites remains consistent year-over-year, with an overall increase in high-quality clicks—those where users stay longer without immediately returning. The introduction of AI Overviews has encouraged users to try more complex and longer queries and exposes more links per result, giving websites more visibility and click opportunities. While straightforward questions may be answered directly, users often click through to explore richer content such as in-depth reviews, personal analysis, and forums. Traffic is shifting toward authentic, engaging formats, and Google emphasizes that its AI experiences are purposely designed to enhance—not replace—the open web, featuring transparent source attribution and adherence to web standards. Google

Claude Sonnet 4 Expands to 1M Token Context Window: Anthropic has increased Claude Sonnet 4's context limit to 1 million tokens—a fivefold jump—enabling developers to process massive codebases, analyze large document sets, and maintain context across complex workflows in a single request. The long-context feature is now in public beta on the Anthropic API for Tier 4 and custom accounts, also available in Amazon Bedrock and coming soon to Google Cloud's Vertex AI. Updated pricing applies to prompts over 200K tokens, with caching and batch options reducing costs. Early users, including Bolt.new and iGent AI, report major productivity boosts in large-scale coding and autonomous engineering. Anthropic

Threads Surpasses 400M Monthly Active Users: Threads has reached a major milestone, with more than 400 million people using the platform each month. Adam Mosseri via Threads

Temporary Reach Boost for Edits Content: Meta confirmed that content created with its Edits app is currently receiving a short-term reach boost to help grow the app, but cautioned creators against using it purely to bypass content checks, noting that detection systems are in place. The platform is incorporating signals like the probability of a user tapping the Edits button into its ranking algorithm, aiming to show more Edit-focused posts to audiences most likely to engage and potentially adopt the app. Adam Mosseri via Threads

Instagram Marketing API Deprecation Accelerated: Meta has moved up the deprecation date for legacy Instagram fields in the Marketing API to September 9, 2025, ahead of the previously planned January 2026 deadline, starting with Marketing API v22.0. Developers are urged to migrate before the deadline to prevent disruptions, as the changes already apply for Graph API v22.0 users with auto-updates. Impacted API calls include various GET and POST endpoints. Full details are available in Meta's developer documentation. Meta

Meta Expands Brand Rights Protection with Scam Ad Reporting: Meta has rolled out major updates to its Brand Rights Protection tool, enabling all enrolled businesses to report suspected scam ads at scale, even if the ads don't directly use their intellectual property. The enhancement also covers misleading ads that exploit brand names without permission. Alongside this, Meta has redesigned the takedown request process to be more intuitive, adding violation-type sub-tabs and improved search and filtering in the Reports tab. Meta

TikTok Expands Affiliate Program to Services with TikTok Go: TikTok has introduced TikTok Go, a new affiliate tool that lets creators earn commissions from promoting services such as hotel bookings, restaurant vouchers, and local experiences. The feature is now available in Indonesia, Japan, and the United States, with hotel bookings currently the only service category in the US. This expansion moves beyond physical products, allowing creators to monetize service-based recommendations in areas like travel, food, wellness, and education, paving the way for broader creator–brand partnerships. TikTok via LinkedIn

Gemini Adds Personalization and Temporary Chat Privacy Mode: Google has updated the Gemini app with new personalization and privacy tools. Users can now allow Gemini to reference past chats for more tailored responses, rolling out first to 2.5 Pro in select countries. A new Temporary Chat mode enables quick, one-off conversations that aren't saved, personalized, or used for training, with data kept for up to 72 hours. The update also introduces renamed and expanded data controls under "Keep Activity," letting users decide how files, photos, and shared audio or video are used. All settings are adjustable at any time for maximum control. Google

Grok Auto-Translate Rolls Out to All U.S. X Users: X has launched Grok's auto-translate feature for all U.S. users, enabling posts in Japanese and numerous other languages to be automatically translated into English. The update is designed to break down language barriers, making global content more accessible and encouraging cross-cultural engagement on the platform. X

LinkedIn Introduces Thought Leader Event Ads for B2B Marketing: LinkedIn has rolled out Thought Leader Event Ads, enabling advertisers to sponsor member posts that link directly to event pages. Aimed at enhancing trust and authenticity in B2B marketing, the format lets brands amplify the voices of executives, creators, and industry experts—with member permission required before promotion. Available globally through Campaign Manager, these ads build on LinkedIn's findings that Thought Leader Ads drive 1.6× higher engagement than single image ads, offering marketers a new way to connect with audiences around key events. LinkedIn

TikTok Adds Avatar-Sticker Mixing in DMs: TikTok has introduced a new messaging feature that lets users blend their personal avatar with stickers in direct messages. JonahManzano via Threads

YouTube Rolls Out Auto-Dub Editing, More Post Images, and Promote Updates: YouTube is adding new creator tools, including the ability to edit videos in Studio that have automatic dubbing enabled, with dubbed tracks automatically recreated to match edits. Editing for manually uploaded multi-language audio will arrive later this year. The platform is also doubling the image limit for community posts from 5 to 10, with rollout across all devices by week's end. Additionally, YouTube Promote campaigns for website visits now allow more specific calls to action, such as "Book Now" or "Contact Us," currently available on desktop. YouTube

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Did You Know?

Medieval iron gall ink, a primary pen ink from the Middle Ages into the 19th century, was made from oak galls, iron sulfate, water, and gum arabic as a binder. This ink was inherently corrosive and would often cause damage to paper over time. Iron gall ink's signature feature is that it starts as a bluish-black color and ages to a rusty brown.

Michael Stelzner, Founder and CEO

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We publish updates with links for our new posts and content from partners. Your information: Email: tukangpostemel@gmail.com Opted in on: 2021-09-06 17:03:43 UTC.

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