Latest Digital / Social Media Marketing News & Insights

​Presented by Neal Schaffer​

In this week's newsletter:

• It’s easy to assume a page one ranking gives you an outsized chance of AI visibility.
• Is Google Search still “search” at all?
• AI Agents are coming — and they could be a game-changer for small teams.

Hey Reader,

My own analytics have been calling me out lately.

The LinkedIn posts that represent my best work, the charts and frameworks and data, don't perform nearly as well as I'd expect on LinkedIn. The personal ones, the milestones and photos I almost don't publish, beat them consistently. Then I looked at my feed and saw faces everywhere. Selfies, hotel rooms, whiteboards, hallways. The platform that used to run on charts is running on people. (Which reminds me: Please connect with me on LinkedIn if we are not connected there yet!)

I write about this shift for a living. It's a different thing to watch it show up in your own numbers.

So instead of guessing, I asked my network what they actually wanted more of from me: me in the moment, the professional stuff, or the story behind why I post what I post.

Here's the thing, though: the answers were sharper than anything I would have landed on alone.

​Kris Kristoffersen went after my premise. The personal posts get the likes, but nobody screenshots a hotel room and puts it into their own process. Data and frameworks do that. If the algorithm rewards faces, that's a distribution problem, not a signal to change what you make.

​Susan Tyson turned it into a sequence: photos earn the first click, the story creates context, the frameworks give it value.

And Tim Krywulak made the point I keep circling back to, which is that framework posts were never supposed to win on reactions in the first place. Measure those on profile visits, click-throughs, and sales.

Forty-six comments later (you can see all of the comments by clicking here), my read is that it was never a choice between the three. The best content carries all of them, and the moment a post becomes only about you, it stops working.

Which is the real lesson: when you're not sure what your audience wants, just ask. Then read the replies closely, because the most useful thinking usually comes from the person disagreeing with how you framed the question.

Same goes here. I'd love to know what you want more of from this newsletter. Hit reply and tell me.

Now let's get into this week's updates!

Please note: Some links in this newsletter are affiliate links. If you make a purchase through them, I may earn a small commission—at no extra cost to you.

This Week's News

New Research Reveals 75% Of LinkedIn AI Citations Come From Individual Profiles, Not Company Pages - Your company page is not what AI is citing. An analysis of 9.5 million citations across 16 B2B categories found that 75% of LinkedIn AI citations trace back to individual profiles, and LinkedIn now sits second only to YouTube among the sources AI models pull from. More surprising: 51% of those citations came from members with under 10,000 followers. Reach is not the gatekeeper here. Stop pouring effort into the company page and start posting from your personal profile this week. Social Media Today​

How Google AIOs Use Facebook, Instagram & TikTok From 300 Million US Searches - Social platforms are quietly becoming search infrastructure. Analysis of roughly 300 million US searches found Facebook cited as a source in 19.5 million AI Overviews, with Instagram at 877,000 and TikTok at 78,000. Roughly one in 15 searches now pulls its answer from social media. The pattern rewards precise, answerable posts over sheer audience size, which flips the usual assumption that follower count drives discovery. Your social content is not just social content anymore. It is search inventory. Search Engine Journal​

How To Network On LinkedIn (Even With People You Don't Know Yet) - I have spent close to two decades building my LinkedIn network, and the hardest part has never changed: reaching people who do not already know you. In my latest post I break down both sides of that problem, the inbound approach that brings the right people to you and the outbound approach that gets strangers to say yes. The platform has grown enormously, which makes a deliberate method matter more than it used to. Work through this and cold outreach stops feeling cold. Neal Schaffer​

How Small Businesses Are Really Using AI: 5 Eye-Opening Findings - Two years ago about a third of marketers used AI daily. Today it is closer to three in four. That shift anchors a new industry report where 60% of respondents run businesses of ten people or fewer, so the findings reflect your world rather than enterprise budgets. The uncomfortable detail: 85% of marketers taught themselves AI by experimenting, only 7% received company training, and 53% pay for their tools out of pocket. Seven percent. That is the whole story. Social Media Examiner​

Instagram Post Size In 2026: The Right Dimensions After The 3:4 Grid Change - I noticed something was off on my own grid before I understood why. My posts looked wrong, and it turned out Instagram had changed the grid to 3:4 and quietly changed the math on every image I had been sizing for years. In my latest post I walk through what happens to your existing library and why 4:5 at 1080 by 1350 still wins for most accounts. Ignore this and Instagram keeps cropping your best work without asking. Neal Schaffer​

This Week's Sponsor

​Hootsuite: Social Media Made Easier!​

Managing social media doesn’t have to mean juggling a dozen different tools. Hootsuite brings publishing, engagement, and analytics together in one place, helping you stay organized and see what’s working. If you want to simplify your social media workflow, it’s well worth a try.

More Recommended Reads

9 AI Search Myths, Debunked by 15 Million Data Points - Most of what marketers repeat about AI search is inherited from SEO, and a study spanning 15 million data points takes nine of those assumptions apart. The findings cover what genuinely influences whether AI platforms surface your content and what turns out to be noise you have been optimizing for anyway. Worth reading before your next quarter of content planning, because the tactics that move AI visibility are not the ones most teams are funding. How many of the nine are you still betting on? Search Engine Journal​

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Building An AI Creative Director: From Ideas To Finished Content With Claude - Here is a build worth studying if you have no creative team. One creator runs an entire content system inside Claude, where every piece originates from her own journal and experiences rather than from a prompt asking for ideas. The AI handles ideation, drafting, and reformatting across platforms, while scheduling and publishing stay firmly manual to protect her accounts. It also surfaces engagement data when instinct says to abandon a topic that is actually working. If you have been meaning to build a repeatable content system, start here. Social Media Examiner​

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AI Visibility Index Shows Which Brands Are Disappearing - Strong SEO does not guarantee AI recall, and the exceptions are where this gets useful. More than nine in ten brands behaved predictably, with search authority tracking AI visibility, but healthcare giants including Medtronic, GoodRx, and Humana were badly under-indexed while telehealth-native names surfaced instead. The likely cause is not thin content. The models have filed those brands under a different category than the one buyers search. Category signals, not volume, are becoming the visibility problem the industry has to solve next. Martech​

The Best AI Tools For Social Media Content Creation In 2026 - Tool roundups usually blur together, and this one avoids that by organizing around bottlenecks instead of features. Jasper and Anyword handle captions, Canva and Adobe Express cover visuals, OpusClip and Riverside turn long video into clips, and Perch and Buffer manage scheduling. The advice underneath matters more than the list: start with the specific bottleneck you are trying to fix, and do not trade one bottleneck for another by adding steps. A tool that saves an hour and costs two is not a tool. Hootsuite​

Google Search Is Becoming AI Search: What This Means For Your Brand - Google's Search VP said it plainly at I/O this year: Google search is AI search. The Intelligent Search Box now accepts files, images, and open browser tabs. Information Agents monitor the web around the clock without anyone running a search. Meanwhile position-one click-through has fallen from 27% to 11% in measured data, and AI Mode passed a billion monthly users in its first year. Information Agents reach US subscribers this summer, which makes being citable an August problem rather than a 2027 one. Neil Patel​

​Digital Threads​

Digital Threads is a practical guide for small business owners, entrepreneurs, and creators who want to grow their online presence with confidence. Learn proven digital marketing strategies, make the most of social media and AI tools, and build your brand without a massive marketing budget.

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