Latest Digital / Social Media Marketing News & Insights

​Presented by Neal Schaffer​

In this week's newsletter:

• Your own comparison post may be teaching AI to recommend your competitors.
• ChatGPT ads just grew up a little.
• If delegation, not chat, is your next AI step, check out below!

Hey Reader,

I got an email from an NBC News producer this week.

They were putting together a segment for Top Story with Tom Llamas about Starbucks paying some of its baristas to create TikTok content, and what that says about where influencer marketing and employee-generated content are headed. They wanted my take on camera. National news, right in my wheelhouse. I'll admit I read that one twice.

Here's the thing, though: I have no idea how NBC found me. And that's exactly the point. Nobody hands you an opportunity like that because you pitched your way into a newsroom. It happens because you've been out there, over and over, talking about what you know, on the blog, on the podcast, on YouTube, on LinkedIn. You really never know who's quietly reading or listening on the other end. It's a big reason I keep writing books, too. There are plenty of experts on any given topic, but very few of them ever actually sit down and write the book, and that gap happens to be the whole idea behind the one I'm working on right now. More on that soon.

Now for the part that stings a little. Their turnaround was two hours, and I didn't even see the email until three hours in. Missed the window by an hour. To their credit they were gracious about it and thanked me for getting back to them, so who knows, maybe it comes back around someday.

But I'll be honest, that missed hour has been rattling around in my head all week. It's the clearest reminder yet of why I've been pouring so much into AI lately. The more of the mundane work I can automate or hand off, the more room I get back for the things that actually matter: going deeper with my clients, putting more into every talk, and writing content that's worth someone's time. And being present enough to say yes when a two-hour window like this one opens up. That's what the AI workflow flywheel has been about for me all along. It was never about doing the busywork faster. It's about having the time and the attention to move when something good comes along.

Anyway, has an opportunity ever found you out of nowhere, off of something you put out into the world? Hit reply and tell me, I love hearing these.

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

How To Make AEO And GEO Profitable: Lessons From 100 Campaigns - Getting cited in AI answers is not the same as getting paid, and that gap is where most AEO and GEO programs quietly lose money. After analyzing more than 100 campaigns, NP Digital found the winners share four traits: retrieval-ready content, authority signals, multi-channel distribution, and conversion systems built for low-click visits. The payoff is real. AI-referred visitors convert at 8.3 times the rate of traditional traffic and generate seven times more revenue per visitor, but only if your funnel is built to catch them. Neil Patel​

AI Search: Is Your Content Strategy Accidentally Recommending Your Competitors? - Here is an uncomfortable possibility: your own comparison post may be teaching AI to recommend your competitors. When Lily Ray analyzed 100 B2B software queries in Google's AI Overviews, she found that when a brand's own listicle got cited, the brand was left out of the recommendation 69% of the time. Citations and recommendations are different games. What earns a citation is your page. What earns a recommendation is how often the rest of the web covers you. The fix lives off your site, not on it. Search Engine Journal​

LinkedIn Ads: An Honest B2B Guide To What's Worth Paying For In 2026
- I have advised B2B teams on LinkedIn since before it had an ad platform worth the name, and the top reason people quit is sticker shock. Dreamdata's 2026 benchmarks put LinkedIn's cost per click near four times Meta's, which looks damning until you follow the money downstream. On actual revenue, LinkedIn returned 121% ROAS, the only major platform in the black. The premium is real, but it pays off only when your deal sizes can absorb pricey clicks. Get that right and LinkedIn becomes the most efficient paid channel in B2B. Neal Schaffer​

Five Ways To Use YouTube Shorts To Grow Your Channel - Views don't equal fans, and that gap is the whole problem with treating Shorts as a numbers game. YouTube's own team makes the case that community is built through conversation, not monologue, and points to five interactive tools that do the inviting for you: Poll, Quiz, Q&A, and Add Yours stickers, plus Video Replies that turn a great comment into your next Short. The Q&A sticker alone doubles as a content calendar, surfacing the exact videos your audience is asking for. Stop broadcasting at your viewers and start talking with them. YouTube​

Influencer Marketing Statistics: 20 Numbers That Actually Matter In 2026 - I wrote the book on influence and have built these programs as a Fractional CMO, so when I say influencer marketing stopped being an experiment, the numbers settle it. Global spend hit $32.55 billion in 2025, and 87.49% of marketers plan to spend more this year. Yet it still claims under 2% of global ad dollars, which means the runway is long. The brands winning run it as a measured, in-house discipline, not a string of one-off deals. The money and the talent are both moving toward the teams that do. Neal Schaffer​

This Week's Sponsor

​Stay Ahead Of The Conversation With Brand24​

Keeping up with what people say about your brand online can feel impossible—unless you have the right tool. Brand24 helps you monitor mentions across social media, blogs, podcasts, news sites, and more, so you can spot opportunities, manage your reputation, and stay ahead of the conversation.

More Recommended Reads

ChatGPT Ads Custom Audiences - ChatGPT ads just grew up a little. OpenAI now lets advertisers upload customer lists to target or suppress specific people, the same remarketing and exclusion moves you know from Meta. Jon Loomer, who is inside the beta, says it feels like 2012 Facebook ads, early and rough but full of upside. The catch worth flagging is a 100,000-identifier minimum that may shut out smaller lists for now. If you have been waiting for a reason to test conversation-based advertising, the tooling just caught up. On a channel this new, early beats polished. Jon Loomer​

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Building Agentic Workflows With Manus - If your AI work still means copying output from ChatGPT into Gemini into Claude by hand, this one is for you. Social Media Examiner walks through Manus, an agentic tool that does not ask what you want and wait, it takes the goal and executes across other tools on its own. The standout example: a client-proposal process that once ate three to four hours across five platforms now runs as one autonomous workflow, and Manus can log into your accounts without ever seeing your credentials. Worth a serious look if delegation, not chat, is your next AI step. Social Media Examiner​

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Google Search Console Now Shows You Instagram, TikTok, X & YouTube Content Search Performance - Google just handed creators and brands a data source they never had. Search Console's new platform properties show how your Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube posts perform in Google Search and Discover, which queries surface them, and how people find your profiles, even if you do not own a website. For anyone building an audience across feeds rather than one site, this closes a real measurement gap, though it is rolling out gradually. Why keep guessing which social content Google is surfacing when you can finally pull the numbers? Search Engine Round Table​

Reddit Reports More Than 23 Million Daily Spam Views - Reddit is quietly one of the most-cited sources in AI search, which makes its spam problem your problem too. The platform now fields more than 23 million spam views a day, and says its upgraded AI detection blocks about 25,000 spam posts and comments daily, cutting spam exposure roughly 20% year over year. Cleaner threads mean the sources AI engines pull from get more trustworthy, and brand mentions living there carry more weight. Ignore Reddit as a channel and you cede ground in the exact place LLMs go looking for answers. Social Media Today​

62% Of AI Brand Recommendations Vanish After One Buyer Question — New Clovion Data - Showing up in an AI recommendation once means less than you think. A new Clovion study ran nearly 70,000 multi-turn conversations across ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini in 36 B2B categories, and the finding should reset how you read AI visibility. Ask a plain question like best CRM and the list holds. Add one ordinary buyer detail, such as for a small team, and 62% of the brands vanish from the very next answer. For anyone doing GEO, the lesson is blunt: being named by an AI is not the same as being trusted by it. Search Engine Journal​

​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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