Threads Gets 70M Users, Pseo, Ga4, Duolingo Ditches Tv Ads For Memes, Tom Brady Loses $30M

0:00All right, we got a lot to cover this week, a lot of stuff going on and we're going to jump right into it. We're going to talk about how Threads, which is Meta's new Twitter competitor, they got what, 50 million new users in about 24 hours, a little over 24 hours or so, which is now the fastest growing app. I believe it's beaten ChatGPT. It has beaten ChatGPT. 50 million users in a few days. I think ChatGPT was what, 1 million users in five days, which was a record. There's a meme, or not a meme. there's like a infographic of this and it took like seven days or something. And this one's, this one took like a span of seven hours, but also like, keep in mind it wrote on the back of Instagram.

0:41So they're, they're kind of interconnected. So, yep. So, um, but it's a ridiculous amount. And now here's the thing that people don't even talk about with threads. It's not even available in certain countries, like in Europe. And they hit 50 million in literally a matter of a few days not being able for people in all countries to actually use the app. Yeah. So I think, look, I think it's going to continue to grow. And the question is, oh my God, is it Twitter? Is it going to be threads? No, the answer is, it's just going to be and, and people are going to be posting to yet another social platform because it's just another place to get reached.

1:21That's all it is at the end of the day. The funny thing is, I've been playing around with it quite a bit the last day or two. Neil has posted nothing to his thread so far, but it's already got like 50 ,000 followers or so. And I think I'm at like 4 ,000 or something. But the key thing is there are a couple of differences. I, as I'm using it, even though it's basically the same interface as Twitter, I'm like, man, it's, it's a lot friendlier here. I find myself wanting to log into this thing more. And obviously I'm logging in because I want to capture as much organic reach as I can in the early days.

1:51Right. But the fact of the matter is there aren't a lot of trolls. There aren't a lot of bots. The ads haven't come on yet and you aren't seeing like a lot of irrelevant posts. And so I think it's interesting because it's early days and you're kind of, you're kind of in early where it's like freshman year of college. Right. And so, yeah. And I bet you, because they're going after Twitter, mark my words on this reach is going to be great. Everyone's going to see everything. Monetization is non-existent right now. And Facebook just wants virality and a ton of people to be using threads. And they're going to give everyone a lot of followers.

2:24They're going to give you the reach that you want, whether your content's mediocre. Great. So this is the time to double down on threads. And it's not like clubhouse because unlike clubhouse, Facebook is a massive giant and they will invest billions to take over Twitter if they think they can win. And I believe they think they can really win at this point. Yeah. They're going to take shots, right? I mean, keep in mind, meta also Spotify, everyone, they made a clubhouse clone and Twitter made a clubhouse clone as well. And it didn't really work out for them. Twitter still kind of has it, but everyone else basically shut theirs down.

2:55so they're going to take these shots. I actually feel like this one's going to work. A lot of times meta will create stuff and it doesn't really take off, but the fact that a lot of people are using it now, just the usage that you're seeing and the rate that it's growing at, I think it's going to be a thing that will stick around for a while because the behavior is already established on Twitter. People just want to spot the right stuff, right? And the cool thing too is when I'm using it, I can post and I've been, Neil follows me when he looks at my posts on stories. I often share a lot of stuff from Twitter.

3:22Now I'm just sharing more and more stuff from my, my, my threads account. Right. And here's the other thing I find myself not caring as much before I hit the post button on threads. I feel like I can kind of just say whatever I want. And that's a very, that's how you want to be creating content. Again, I gave my, my reasons as to why I'm doing it that way, but I just find myself posting a lot more and multiple times. So go out there, check it out. Don't be like Neil that signs up for it and doesn't post. Actually post something. Dude, it was funny because I was on a vacation with my kids and my wife this week when Threads came out.

3:57And right away, I got a message from my team saying, we signed you up for Threads. I don't even know my login. I know that you sign up through your Instagram app, right? So you need Instagram. It's the same login. It's the same login. Yeah, that's what I figured because it's through the Instagram app is at least what I read online. And my team's like, yeah, we signed up. And I haven't even checked it out or downloaded the app on my phone or anything yet. Yeah, it's no different. I mean, it's the same thing. I think it's good to have something fresh without all the bells and whistles. But bottom line here is if written form, like I love written form.

4:27Neil's first form of content is written form as well. And so my favorite too. I know it's not the favorite for a lot of people to consume content in. But for me, I love creating written content over video and audio content. and funny enough, I also like consuming content through written form over video and audio. That's my preferred method as well. Same here. I'm gonna read some of my threads over here before we move on to the next topic. So my first one was, let's see, the written word requires substance and I'm all for it, right? And then I wrote something about how, don't show me your thirst traps, show me how you think.

5:00And so that's what written form does. Anyway, we'll move on to the next one. So this next one is around PSEO or programmatic SEO. Neil says he doesn't know what this is, but he actually does. Once I explain this, he'll know. And so earlier this week, there is a guy I know, smart guy. He used to run SEO at Shopify. His name's Kevin Indig. And he wrote a post. He collaborated with somebody else on how to do programmatic SEO. So Neil, you know how when you look at TripAdvisor or when you look at Glassdoor or when you look at Yelp, for example, best places to eat in Mexico City. You know what I mean?

5:37They do city-based and they add, depending on the platform that you're talking about, some of them do subdomains for the different countries and then they do slashes for the different cities. And they'll have subdirectors for literally any major topic for hotels, places to eat, places to see and sightsee and the list goes on and on. Correct. And so you're basically making templates, you're doing the research and you're trying to figure out the pages that convert. And usually these pages are more middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel, they have more intent and they drive conversions, right?

6:06And so pizza in Italy, or Milan, Italy. And funny enough, nowadays, you can create a lot of that content using things like chat GPT, because it doesn't have to be up to date, typically the best pizza restaurants, and I say typically, is going to be older ones that have, you know, five 10 ,000 reviews and around for like 2030 years, versus someone who just popped up a pizza restaurant, you know, six months ago, they're probably not going to be coined as the best pizza restaurant in a city. Right. So let's say I'm using Neil's Uber Suggest as an example, right? So Uber Suggest is a free SEO tool that Neil has.

6:41And so what would I create here? Hmm. Well, I would create, there's the best SEO tools, but there's also the competitor alternatives, right? So SEMrush alternatives, I would make Ahrefs alternatives, Moz alternatives. And then you would have articles online. versus yes, versus SEM, versus versus HHS, versus Ubersess, or, uh, and then you would start getting into articles like the best way to do keyword research and the list goes on and on for all the long tail queries. Yep. So the point of bringing this up, so Neil hit it on the head, there are a lot of people now leveraging open AI's API to do this.

7:16And so you might do some keyword mapping and then expand the keywords and you might have 500 or a thousand keywords or whatever. And you might test it in small bursts and see how it goes. And it's been working pretty well for us. And we're looking at scaling it out even more. Now, here's the thing. Everyone's going to be doing this. I truly believe the ones that jump on this quickly that have a strong domain authority, those will be the one that will reap the rewards because you can't have everyone doing this. Not everyone can rank. There's only so much real estate. So programmatic SEO is becoming popular again.

7:46But like I said, I've been doing this for a while. Neil's been doing this for a while too. I used to work at a place. There's nothing new. The only difference changes. People are using chat GBT to automate a lot of this because this type of content is not, there's not a ton of new stuff that's to add to it. It's just regurgitated information and sites with high domain authority are just cranking out these kinds of topics because it's easy for them to rank and they're just gobbling up the long tail. One page doesn't get a lot of traffic, but when you have 500 ,000 of them, it really starts adding up.

8:15Yeah. What's old is new again, right? Sometimes, you know it's like oh direct mail is dead no direct mail is back right and so this is one of those things and the story here is i used to work at a company we used to have a collection of websites like a bunch of humor websites one was called break.com and we would just make a lot of programmatic pages for funny videos funny hollywood videos or like bollywood videos we just make all these categories and templates and then we would just after we created these pages we look at the ones that got high traffic and then we try to figure out how to make these templates convert better because what you're doing is you're creating templates, more keyword research, more templates, more CRO, because when you have a lot of traffic already coming to a website, CRO and SEO kind of go hand in hand.

8:54Yep. All right. So this next one, I actually posted something. I wanted to get a reaction from people on LinkedIn. So I posted something and I said, Hey, this is the cool stuff that's happening in marketing right now. So one, we just talked about, I put PSEO, which is programmatic SEO. Two is AI enhanced blog content. So that's leveraging the power of AI maybe producing 60, 70 % of your content and then having the human in a loop for the end of it. Number three is newsletters becoming fun again. Number four is threads just coming out. We talked about that. And number five is AI content tools, which we've talked about a lot, right?

9:27And I ended this post with what else? And so a lot of people here are talking about, I'm going to share some stuff and Neil, you can give some reactions here. So one person, he put AI powered video generation, transcripts, guide generation, all of a sudden it's incredibly easy to make content. That's one. Two is code interpreter coming to chat GPT plus. Do you know what that is? Uh, no. So that's the ability for chat GPT to interpret the code that you have on your site. And then it'll basically help you rewrite code. And, um, there's another one here, which we can touch upon, which is the rise of B2B creators.

10:01And I think we'll just leave it with that. Yeah. The, the code interpreters, I think that's really cool. Cause then you can do more things like automated SEO on different pages. The rise of B2B influencers, to me, that's not new. There's always a lot of B2B influencers. For example, I've gotten a lot of six-figure deals from PayPal to create videos on them. I put cool stuff, by the way, not new. The what? I put cool stuff happening in marketing, not new. Oh, cool. I thought you were saying new. But even like B2B markers or influencers, I don't think that's cool. That's just been around for ages.

10:35You're not going to get the views that you wouldn't be to see, but keep in mind each customer could be worth potentially, depending on the industry you're in, you know, potentially millions of dollars. You know what I think is cool? And we're going to touch upon this in a second, but I think you have companies like Duolingo that are doing different things. They're replacing TV ads with this other thing, which we'll touch upon. I'm going to leave it, leave a cliffhanger there. The other thing that's a little more recent is connected TV, which we're going to touch upon as well. And one thing that is, we're going to cool or not, we're going to have to get used to it, which we'll touch upon as well is GA four that basically came out this week.

11:09And, you know, I still prefer the old Google analytics. We both do, but you know, we can't complain. Most people do, but we have no choice, right? Cause the privacy and the changes that are happening and Eric and I aren't saying we're against the privacy changes. We're just saying reality is as a marketer, if you're using analytics tool and you have your reports and you've been using it not for two, three, four, five years, but even longer. and you just have this big change, it takes some time to get used to. All right. So I don't know if you saw this, Neil, but the Canadian government halted ads on Facebook and Instagram in a feud over a new law.

11:48So basically this new law is it requires – it passed the law in June requiring digital platforms, including Meta and Alphabet Inc., to negotiate commercial deals with local publishers for featuring news content. Does that make sense to you? Yes. Okay. So both tech giants said they intended to block news on their platforms by the time the law takes effect later this year. So what are our thoughts? Yeah, there's an article about Google talking about that. I didn't see an article on Facebook talking about that or not. So, okay, here's what happened, though. So the Canadian government spent$8.6 million in the fiscal year of 2021 to 2022 on Facebook and Instagram, accounting for more than half of its total social media expenditure.

12:34It spent about Canada, what,$8.8 million on Alphabet's Google during that period. So yeah, it's quite a bit of money. And I think you're going to start seeing more countries start following suit with Canada, but I'm not too worried about Google or Facebook. They'll figure out how to play nice, and they'll figure out how to continually generate revenue and users in these countries are still going to use them. Yeah, I mean, I think what happens in these situations is there's a lot of posturing and there's a lot of flexing on both sides. And then what ends up happening eventually is they end up settling, which is how most of these, this is not even a lawsuit, but you can call it like a fight, right?

13:14A lot of these feuds end up being settled at the end of the day. So just food for thought. Dude, do you remember when Larry Page was the CEO of Google? Do you remember the argument they had with not Canada, Australia? No. Australia wanted to pay more taxes. And then Google was just like, well, we're not going to, you know, we're not, uh, we're not headquartered in Australia, but if you want us to pay more taxes, imagine a role with no Gmail, no Google, you know, no Android or whatever their devices that people are using. They're like, if that's the game you want to play, we'll just pull out. And, uh, of course, Google is still there and I'm pretty sure they didn't end up paying any of those extra taxes.

13:54Yep. So leverage, when it comes down to negotiation, at the end of the day, you have to understand two things, what leverage you have. The second thing is your BATNA, which is your best alternative to a negotiated agreement. And sometimes it's just walking away, right? And well, how does this have anything to do with marketing? It has everything to do with marketing, because if you're going to negotiate a big advertising deal, we better learn how to negotiate, right? So negotiation, talking to people, getting what you need, oftentimes is also a situation where both sides need to win, where you don't feel like you're annihilating the other side.

14:25So eventually these two sides will figure out how to win and not try to kill each other because you don't want to ever embarrass the other party. And speaking of leverage, imagine how pissed Australian citizens would have been with the politicians. If there was no more Gmail, their email stopped working, they couldn't search anymore, their Android devices, they would just be pissed. And they're just, you know, people wouldn't care But yes, I know people ideally want the taxes because it helps improve their roads and schools and all that. And rightfully so. But still, citizens would just be pissed and be like, you just screwed over my life.

14:58And I bet you a lot of those politicians wouldn't have gotten reelected. Dude, speaking of government, I mean, what about France blaming social media and video games for all the crazy stuff that was happening? The riots. Did you see that? Yes. Yeah. So anyway, people always find social media. And I'm not saying social media is causing or isn't, but social media has changed the way a lot of people, A, do things in their lives and how they're reacting to things. It's also making it easier for news and specific messaging to spread. It also makes propaganda easier to spread as well. I'm not saying people are pushing out propaganda, but some countries are.

15:37Well, you know, humans are easy to manipulate, you and I included. so yeah anyway ga4 what are okay so ga4 i mean the rollout came out this week and so we earlier earlier we talked about how we have no choice but to use it do you know there's actually a looker report i don't know if i shared this with you neil there's a looker report that mimics google analytics classic and it's like the same thing yeah yeah i can share the link with you afterwards but those of you that want to that want to see that maybe i'll i'll tell you what I'll throw it on my threads and then Neil can retweet it. So yeah, you can find it there.

16:12We'll share the report. Share it on threads. Message me to retweet it. And then I'll send it to someone on my team to retweet it because I still don't know my login. You have access to it, dude. Dude, I don't know my Instagram password either. You didn't even know your Twitter password. I just slaved on my phone. Anyway. I will start logging this week and I'm going to start seeing if I can start pushing out some content and just playing with it because I think it's going to be fun. You know, all you need to do is, okay, guys, I posted this on threads earlier, by the way. One of my earlier threads was like, there's a Chrome plugin called TweetHunterX, and you add that one.

16:46And if I scroll to like Neil's account, literally, I'm going to do this. I just came up with this idea right now. No, no, but it's not supposed to work on browsers. It's not supposed to work on the mobile app, no? You don't let me finish. So what I would do is I would go to Neil's account, open TweetHunterX, and it would show me all his high performers. What I'm going to do after this call is I'm going to take some of his high performers. I could throw it on my threads. And that's all you have to do. I was taking my high performers. Now I'm just going to jack his and jack whoever else is a philosopher.

17:12I'm kind of kidding though. Tongue in cheek. But that's what all you need to do right now because they're all performing. That's awesome. That's smart. Yeah. So anyway, that's, have you done anything else with GA4? We already have a lot of a report set up, but we adapted to GA4 way before the deadline. Yeah. Okay. Well, I guess that's it on GA4. Everyone was like freaking out about it before, but it's really nothing much to freak out. The amount of webinars we did on GA4 and articles and pushing people and email blasts to say, hey, you got six months left. You got three months left. Check out these reports that you can create.

17:48Here's how to use it. But we were prepared for a long time. Okay. How many leads did you get from that using the same six months, five months, four months, three months, two months? What kind of results did you get from pushing almost the same content? I don't have those stats on, uh, right now, but I do know for a fact, my team wouldn't be continually pushing similar messaging out for six months straight, unless it was driving enterprise leads, which is number one. And we were, uh, and we didn't see conversions in those leads. So I know for a matter of fact, we had to see at least one client for it or else my team wouldn't continue to push.

18:23That's so smart. And you're doing what, two webinars a month. We do two webinars a month and we track what emails and webinars and just blog articles, videos, everything. We track what drives not just the most qualified leads, but what's actually driving revenue. And we actually track LTV based on the channel as well as the content type that they came in from and the messaging to see what's producing the most leads that are the most qualified, what's producing the most amount of revenue, and what's producing the highest LTV. Because even if something produces a large amount for a one-year contract, but something else type of content, let's say on global marketing, because we talked quite a bit about that, it produces less revenue up front, but it produces the highest LTV.

19:04We start focusing more on the stuff and optimizing for LTV versus just short run revenue. All right. Well, next one, we're going to talk about if CTV is worth it. So CTV is connected TV. Do you want to explain what that is, Neil? So connected TV, think about right now, if you want to advertise on TV, most people look at that as linear, old school. Connected TV is internet-based. Imagine you're just clicking some buttons, buying television ad spots, just like you do with Google AdWords or Meta Ads. And you can do this on Hulu. You can start doing ad buys on Netflix, even Prime. Most people don't know with Prime.

19:43You can also have them integrate your products within some of the films and TV series that they're creating. So if you sell water, they can shove in your water for X amount of impressions on a certain show, and then they can replace it with the next person who pays them. But these are all examples of connected TV. And a lot of TV these days is streaming, so you can buy ads through it just like you would on Google ads or Facebook ads versus doing it the old school way. Dude, I can't pull up the screen share here on those of you that are watching on YouTube. By the way, we should share a case study on why our YouTube is growing.

20:18But I'm looking at it right now. And basically, this whole idea of CTV is they basically, they ran a survey. Okay, so this marketing website ran a survey. and it asked the marketers, the CMOs, if they're going to be spending more or less. And the only channel where marketers said they're going to invest more money, 65 % of people said they're going to put more money into it, is connected TV. Because one, for performance marketers, maybe it might be a little easier to run and you might feel like you have more control. You might feel like you have better tracking. And so that's why it's becoming more and more popular.

20:54I don't know about you, Neil, but my connected TV thing is I watch, I mean, I watch a lot of YouTube TV. What else is part of connected TV? You watch a lot of TV. Hulu, Roku. What else? Dude, even just TV in general, you can do direct TV streaming, right? You don't even have to have a dish anymore. You can just stream through the internet. And YouTube as well. They have all these TV channels for a subscription. So here's the thing with the survey too. Most people said they're going to be decreasing social media ad budget and also paid search ad budget as well, which I find interesting. It's kind of like what's old ish is new ish again.

21:36TV. Here's a funny thing. We ran a survey on ad spend in 2023. You know why a lot of people are decreasing social media ad spend? It's not that they want to. It's because of the privacy changes with iOS. And then eventually that Google is going to make as well. It's made it harder for them to spend the same amount and generate the same ROI. And a lot of companies have tried, but they're just not able to generate the ROI with their campaign scaling as fast. That's why a lot of companies are pulling back on paid social media ads. It's not that they don't want to spend. It's that they're not able to do it as efficiently.

22:07When I first started my business, the overwhelm was real. I didn't have the tools to help me scale. If only I had Shopify from the start to handle all the behind the scenes work. Shopify is the platform behind millions of businesses globally from huge names like Mattel and Gymshark to the smallest brands just getting started. The best part about it, it has everything you could need. Say you're ready to launch your own design studio. Shopify has hundreds of templates to create a beautiful store that matches your brand style. Or if you need help with content creation, Shopify has got AI tools that write your product descriptions, craft page headlines, and even enhance your product photos.

22:41Shopify lets you easily create email and social media campaigns to reach customers wherever they are, whether they're scrolling or strolling. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into with Shopify on your side. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school, shopify.com slash marketing school. If you've ever built a website, you know how tough it can be to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast. That's where Framer comes in, and it totally changes the game.