May 16 2026
Meta Doesn’t Know What Business It’s In & The Traffic Data Shows It via @sejournal, @gregjarboe

On Friday, May 8, 2026, The New York Times published a guest essay by investigative journalist Julia Angwin with a headline that demands attention: “Meta Is Dying.” She highlights that Meta lost daily active users in Q1 2026, falling from 3.58 billion in Q4 2025 to 3.56 billion.

Angwin sees this as the beginning of a long, slow decline, comparing the company’s trajectory to AOL in 2003 and Yahoo in 2015: technically alive, still profitable, but entering what she bluntly calls the “zombie era.”

She may be right. And if she is, Theodore Levitt told us exactly why this would happen, 66 years ago.

The Lesson Meta Never Learned

In 1960, Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt published “Marketing Myopia” in the Harvard Business Review. His central argument was that companies fail not because demand disappears, but because they define their business too narrowly. Railroads collapsed because they thought they were in the railroad business rather than the transportation business. Trolley car companies were replaced by automobiles they could have pioneered. “People don’t want a quarter-inch drill,” Levitt wrote. “They want a quarter-inch hole.”

Now look at Meta’s six major pivots over 22 years and ask: What business did Mark Zuckerberg actually think he was in?

In 2021, he declared the answer was “the metaverse business” – a bet whose Reality Labs division has since accumulated roughly $80 billion in operating losses. Users didn’t agree. In 2023, he pivoted to generative AI and has since committed over $100 billion to building models that, as Angwin notes, currently perform worse than the competition. Q1 2026 results show record revenue of $56.3 billion, up 33% year over year, but also $33.44 billion in total costs, a 35% increase, and an AI spending outlook that has rattled investors.

The revenue looks strong. The trajectory looks like a company that keeps pivoting to new product definitions while its core users quietly disengage.

What The Traffic Data Actually Shows

This is where opinion meets evidence, and the Similarweb traffic for March 2026 is instructive.

Google leads the world with 86.9 billion monthly visits. YouTube follows with 29.3 billion. Facebook comes in third at 11.9 billion, and Instagram comes in fourth at 7.1 billion. That gap between Google and Facebook, is the data equivalent of what Levitt was describing. Google defined itself as being in the information access business. Facebook defined itself as being in the social network business. One of those definitions scales indefinitely. The other runs out of room.

The AI category data is even more pointed. ChatGPT records 5.7 billion monthly visits globally, with year-over-year growth of 28.5%. Gemini is growing sharply at 283.8% YoY. Claude.ai jumped 423.7% to 613.7 million visits YoY.

Meta.ai does not appear in the top 100 most-visited websites.

Meta spent $100 billion entering the AI race. It is not winning it.

The Squeeze Play Angwin Describes

When an aging platform’s user base starts to shrink, the immediate response is almost always the same: monetize harder. Angwin documents this clearly. Meta’s Q1 ad impressions increased 19% year over year while average ad prices rose 12%. Revenue per user jumped 27%. The company is cramming more ads onto its platforms and charging advertisers more for each one.

This is the move that maximizes short-term revenue while accelerating long-term decline. More ads mean a worse user experience. A worse experience means slower growth. Slower growth means the ad inventory eventually stops expanding. Levitt described this as the trap companies fall into when they focus on selling their current product harder rather than understanding what customers actually need.

For digital marketers and SEO professionals, this creates a near-term concern. Meta’s Advantage+ advertising suite delivers genuinely strong performance data – a $4.52 return per dollar spent, 22% higher than comparable manual campaigns, according to Meta’s own earnings reports. But those returns depend on a healthy, engaged user base generating meaningful behavioral signals. If the user base contracts and ad load increases simultaneously, signal quality degrades, and performance follows.

The Counterargument Worth Taking Seriously

Angwin’s essay is persuasive, but she is writing opinion, not analysis, and the full Q1 picture is more complicated than “dying” suggests. Year-over-year, Meta’s daily active user base still grew 4%. The quarter-over-quarter decline has a partially verifiable explanation in internet disruptions in Iran and Russia’s WhatsApp ban. Revenue growth of 33% is not the profile of a company in terminal decline.

What it is, is the profile of a company spending at a scale that requires the growth to continue, while its AI investments have not yet produced meaningful new revenue streams. As the Wall Street Journal‘s Asa Fitch observed this week, “the spending growth looks increasingly unsustainable.”

Levitt’s lesson wasn’t that myopic companies always die quickly. AOL and Yahoo lingered for years. The lesson was that once a company loses the plot on what business it’s actually in, recovery becomes structurally difficult. Every dollar spent defending the wrong definition is a dollar not spent understanding the customer.

The question Levitt would ask isn’t whether Meta is dying. It’s whether Meta has ever clearly understood what business it was actually in. Across six pivots in 22 years, the answer appears to be: not consistently.

That uncertainty is now visible in the traffic data. And traffic data doesn’t lie.

More Resources:

Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Apr 7 2026
SEO Wins from Reddit Pro

Reddit is courting businesses. The social media giant provides commercial users with on-platform analytics, visibility tools, and advertising options.

Reddit Pro is free for businesses that provide their name, URL, category, and number of employees. Approval is instant and requires no paperwork.

The Pro dashboard includes an underrated section called Trends for tracking any topic or keyword. Trends lists recent threads mentioning your keyword(s) and provides an AI-generated analysis of the context and sentiment of the discussions. A weekly email summarizes that activity.

Here’s how to use the Trends data for off-site organic search optimization.

Reddit Trends for SEO

Topic ideas

Tracking relevant (to your industry) Reddit conversations is a helpful content idea generator to know the interests of your target audience.

Trends’ “questions” tab is especially useful for fresh ideas, as it reveals popular threads (within a week, month, or 3 months) phrased or implied as questions.

Trends’ “Questions” tab reveals popular threads phrased or implied as questions. Click image to enlarge.

Brand sentiment

Reddit Pro’s AI analysis of any keyword context (i) identifies how redditors are discussing your brand, and (ii) highlights negative and positive experiences. Businesses can then address common concerns on their own sites (optimized for organic search visibility on Google) and across all social media.

Over time, the negative experiences should lessen, and branded search results on Google and elsewhere should increase.

Reddit Pro’s AI analysis identifies how Redditors are discussing your brand. Click image to enlarge.

Monitor competitors

Tracking competitors on Reddit:

  • Identifies their customers’ frustrations, to adjust your own content and emphasize your brand’s solutions.
  • Shows their product positioning and target audience based on the discussions.
  • Reveals previously unknown competing brands.

Pro users can monitor competitors on actual conversations as well as on Reddit’s AI analysis.

Users of Reddit Pro can monitor competitors via on-site discussions or from the platform’s AI analysis. Click image to enlarge.

Trends and popularity

Charts on Reddit Pro show trends in topics and “smart keywords” (i.e., high-volume) to quickly see what’s rising or falling, as well as seasonal interests.

Pro users can filter charts by date range to identify when discussions spiked around their target audience.

The filter is limited to 3 prior months, however, which is too restrictive.

Charts on Reddit Pro reveal trends in topics and “smart keywords.” This example shows discussions about HubSpot. Click image to enlarge.

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Feb 25 2026
New Platforms Won’t Save Social Media: Here’s What’s Actually Shifting via @sejournal, @rio_seo

Today, trust in popular platforms is diminishing, organic reach is haphazard and hard to predict, and user behavior is growing more difficult to discern than ever before. At the same time, a steady stream of “new” social platforms are entering the game, promising to fix what’s broken and usher in the most qualified audience for your unique business.

Yet despite these claims, most of these new platforms won’t erase social media’s common challenges. The problem with social media isn’t that we need more platforms or a better one. The main issue lies in the underlying model, which was historically attention-driven and algorithmically mediated.

The future of social media won’t be a breakthrough app or a surprising new feature. Social media will develop around how, where, and why people connect, shaped by fragmentation and AI acting as an intermediary. In this post, we will dive deeper into why the current social media model is eroding and what the future of social might look like to help you address your strategy for 2026.

The Cracks In Today’s Social Media Model

User dissatisfaction is loud and real. Scrolling is faster. Attention is thinner. Comment sections are either dead quiet or strangely hostile. And a lot of users seem to be treating social less like a place to connect and more like something to get through.

For brands, the frustration is different but just as real. Platforms still push the same headline numbers (views, likes, engagement rate) because they’re easy to show and easy to celebrate. But those numbers don’t always line up with what your business actually needs.

If you can’t tie social activity to outcomes that matter (leads, purchases, appointments, store visits, whatever “success” is for you), you end up in a familiar loop: posting, boosting, reporting, and still not being able to answer the hard question, did this do anything?

Creators and social teams are stuck in the churn, too. The expectation now is constant output, and audiences are feeling inundated and overwhelmed by the sheer volume of content out there, potentially tuning out messages that would resonate with them otherwise.

Then, there’s trust. A lot of users simply don’t believe what they see on social media anymore. Moderation feels inconsistent. Rule changes are vague. Algorithms shift without warning. Misinformation spreads fast, and platform responses often look like cleanup crews arriving after the fire’s already moved on. That wears people down. And once that skepticism sets in, it’s hard to win back. A recent study found that 41% of U.S. adults do not trust information posted on social media very often, and 16% don’t trust it at all. Moderation policies aren’t perceived as strong or transparent.

From a business perspective, the aforementioned challenges compound:

Solving these problems is going to take more than introducing a new social media platform. A new user interface wouldn’t suffice either, nor would ramping up your posting schedule. These challenges are rooted much deeper. The inherent issues are how social media platforms have been built and ways in which they’re monetizing.

Why “New Platforms” Keep Promising The Same Fix

When users are loud enough to voice their dissatisfaction, it catches attention. We see the same familiar song and dance: A new platform emerges promising to fix the issues consumers are most frustrated by. There are promises of chronological feeds, fewer ads, more moderation, and healthier discourse.

While these promises sound great in theory, history shows that most platforms struggle to make these promises become a reality in the long term. As they scale, so too do the inherent issues that continue to plague social media.

The truth is, growth requires monetization. However, monetization equals ads and incentives that favor engagement over nuance. The same issues come to light, just under a different brand name.

This doesn’t mean new platforms aren’t worth checking out; in fact, some will likely find sustainable niches. However, new platforms should veer away from making bold proclamations of fixing social media’s most common issues. If we see these claims, we should know they’re likely overstated and unlikely to come to fruition.

A certain level of skepticism must persist. New and emerging platforms like Tangle have the best intentions in mind; however, the economic reality of running a financially successful social media platform won’t exist without some sort of monetization play.

The Real Shift: From Social Platforms To Social Surfaces

Social interaction doesn’t just take place on posts and traditional feeds. Users are discovering brands for the first time through social media. Deep conversations are taking place on diverse platforms. Influencing is occurring beyond just Instagram:

  • TikTok is more than a platform for watching viral videos. Nearly half (43%) of adults under the age of 30 regularly their news from TikTok.
  • Reddit search traffic has continued to drastically rise, reaching 1.1 billion visits in February 2026, cementing its growing dominance in the social media landscape.
  • Discord, subreddits, private and public Facebook groups, and more are becoming a trusted resource for product recommendations, businesses to work with, and who or what is most credible.
  • 89% of shoppers say YouTube has the best information about products and brands, making it a primary sales enabler.

Social media is no longer just an outlet for expressing our innermost personal thoughts. Over the next few years, social media will likely become a predominant forum where people turn to in the decision-making phase of the sales journey, where they’re seeking input from others before they make a purchase.

The recent Google experimentation to include social media channel insights in Google Search Console supports this train of thought, highlighting that even Google is paying attention to social performance and how it drives discovery.

AI Is Becoming The New Social Layer

In the future, we can expect to see AI summarizing conversations (similar to how AI Overviews in Google shares the most relevant information at the top of the SERPs for most queries), highlighting trends, and shaping how information is presented as well as consumed.

Instead of scrolling through comments to ascertain common themes and opinions, users will encounter (and are already beginning to encounter) synthesized versions of what people are saying. Pertinent information is being easily surfaced with “Here’s what people are saying” and “Here are key themes.”

This new AI layer in social media will have both benefits and drawbacks. On the positive side, information is easily presented without having to dig through thousands of comments. On the other hand, the gap widens between human discourse, with people missing unpopular or uncommon opinions. In turn, nuance can be lost, and divergent perspectives don’t get the attention they might deserve. When algorithms have such a heavy hand in deciding what matters, differing perspectives can get lost in the shuffle.

AI in social media will evolve, deciding how social signals are interpreted, what information gets surfaced, and whose voice will be the loudest.

What Social Media Could Look Like In 3-5 Years

On the surface, social media won’t look entirely different in the future. We’ll still see the same familiar feeds and formats; however, the behind-the-scenes will likely look different. Without making single-point predictions, it’s more helpful to think of possible scenarios that may arise.

Scenario One: Fragmented, Purpose-Built Networks

The future won’t belong to one or two social media platforms. We will start to see smaller ones that are better suited for specific behaviors, and users will begin to diversify their social media usage. These platforms may be focused on local discovery, professional learning, strictly commerce, or creator-audience relationships. The big-name platforms will still be there and will still be used; these more niche platforms will simply coexist with them.

Scenario Two: AI-Mediated Social Experiences

Feeds will highlight the most important information first, in the form of summaries and recommendations. Users will see highlights and takeaways from conversations, without the need to scan and scroll through hundreds of comments. AI will interpret data and signals on our behalf, based on our behavior and interests. Our feeds will be curated to align with our tastes, surfacing more relevant and timely information.

Scenario Three: Social Without The Social App

Social encounters won’t be limited to traditional social media platforms. Users will be able to interact with others through search, maps, commerce, productivity tools, and more. The validation phase of the sales journey will happen where decisions are actively being made, without the need to navigate to other platforms to read reviews or connect with previous purchases.

It’s important to note that each of the aforementioned scenarios eliminates the need and desire for social media platforms. They simply redistribute the use and where it’s going to take place.

What This Means For Marketers

The old social media playbook is out. A mindset change is a must for social media marketers. Jumping on the latest and greatest platform doesn’t guarantee results. Understanding consumer behavior and how social signals contribute to decision-making is paramount. Showing up credibly and authentically in decision-making moments is the true driver of meaningful positive change in the social game.

For marketers, this means you should:

  • Prioritize creating relevant content over reaching more eyes.
  • Invest in trust signals such as responding to both positive and negative reviews, actively engaging in online communities, and showcasing your expertise and authority digitally.
  • Measure the mark you’re making beyond likes and impressions. Start to think about how consideration, validation, and action can be measured, too.
  • Ditch the hitting an arbitrary post goal train of thought. Instead, craft meaningful messages to delight and inform your target audience.
  • Foster a participation mentality; be proactive and join the conversation when and where you can.

Bottom Line: Social Media Is Being Rewritten By Behavior, Not Platforms

Social media isn’t going away any time soon. But the rules are being rewritten behind the scenes. AI is taking over, and it has no plans of slowing down.

Social is no longer just limited to a platform; it’s migrating into search results, AI summaries, niche communities, and more. It doesn’t always look or feel like traditional social media. It certainly doesn’t operate that way, given the AI evolution.

Brands chasing the promise of the next new platform won’t win. It will be those that adapt to changes in consumer behavior: showing up where consumers are engaging and actively seeking information to validate their decisions. Winning brands will understand how and why people connect, what it takes to earn their trust, and where influence happens in the customer journey.

The next era of social media is already happening, quietly unfolding behind the scenes with every click, search, and behavior change.

More Resources:

Featured Image: Collagery/Shutterstock

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Jan 28 2026
Social Channel Insights In Search Console: What It Means For Social & Search via @sejournal, @rio_seo

Google has been testing Social Channel Insights inside Google Search Console (GSC). This update may appear small, but it’s more than meets the eye. In the search landscape, these new social insights translate to a bigger shift happening behind the scenes, where search and social data converge to improve visibility.

The official announcement from Google highlighted the growth of businesses managing their digital presence on popular social media sites. The integration makes sense as social media continues to become a popular method for search discovery and information, with 15% of consumers believing social media to be the most accurate/current source to find up-to-date business details.

The expansion of the social report feature showcases performance for accounts Google associates with a website, allowing businesses a centralized location for reviewing key search and discoverability metrics. This update signifies just how intertwined search and social are becoming. Search and social should no longer be treated as disparate functions, but rather integral counterparts that must communicate and coordinate to improve online visibility and discovery.

A Closer Look At Google’s Social Channel Insights Test

When digging into Google Search Console Insights to ascertain what exactly these new social metrics entail, we see a plethora of new information has been added. It appears as though this feature isn’t readily available to all, but is only showing up for some websites where Google was able to locate their social media channels. Of those who have seen the new social media report features, they’re seeing:

  • The total reach from Google to your social channels.
  • Social media content performance.
  • Queries drive traffic to your social channels.
  • Trends such as high average duration or post growth.

Right now, it appears as though the social media metrics measured focus mostly on referral insights. This isn’t merely a slight tweak to the user experience. It could be seen as a strategic convergence of data, meant to shine a spotlight on how social goes hand in hand with search performance.

Does This Mean Social Is Having More Influence?

Google doesn’t typically make updates for fun or convenience. Each update is a signal for what they plan to evaluate next as part of their never-ending quest to maintain dominancy in the search engine landscape.

Even though Google hasn’t explicitly stated that social engagement metrics have direct influence, this could be an acknowledgement that discovery is increasingly happening on other channels, such as AI platforms and social media.

Search has fractured with other players joining the race, and Google is clearly noticing and adapting. In fact, a study found nearly a quarter (24%) of U.S. adults use social media as their primary search method, while another 24% use search primarily but also social media occasionally. 78% of global internet users leverage social media to research brands and products, and over 60% of Gen Z consumers have purchased a product they’ve found on social media.

Search engines are no longer the sole place consumers start their sales journey. Users use AI to research and ask questions, or seek out online reviews and testimonies on social media channels. Search engines are becoming more of a validation layer, where users go after they research all the options to confirm information, or seek additional information, and then move to the transaction stage.

How Social Channel Insights Could Impact Social Campaigns

When it comes to social, evaluating performance in the past may have looked like chasing more likes and comments. Engagement, of course, still matters, but Google is telling us what other insights we should consider, right inside your GSC dashboard.

Social referral insights give social media marketers visibility into how their content performs in the search discovery journey. Writing social posts to meet an arbitrary number or goal isn’t the end game. It’s about finding the posts that have the influence.

For social campaigns, social insights can help you:

  • Identify which social content themes generate downstream search demand.
  • Use query-level insights to inform what you write and the message you want to get across.
  • Highlighting social’s distinct role in discovery, not just engaging passive viewers.
  • Coordinate more seamlessly with SEO teams in terms of campaign launches and promotions to capitalize on growing demand.
  • Empower marketers to create content that resonates and aligns with what users are likely to search for next, keeping you one step ahead of the game.

Instead of considering traditional social media metrics (such as comments, shares, or likes), social teams can use these new Social Channel Insights in GSC to increase online visibility.

What Social Signals We’d Like To See Google Include Next

Google, if you’re reading this, here’s what we’d love to see beyond referral behavior to help marketers provide even more strategic value.

Social insights that could meaningfully support discovery-focused strategies include:

  • Content velocity indicators: Show us how quickly topics gain traction on social before search demand spikes.
  • Content format indicators: Tell us what content formats perform best for winning search discovery, whether that be short-form videos or static posts.
  • Topic momentum indicators: Help us understand emerging themes gaining attention across platforms.
  • Creator and brand association indicators: Give us more transparency around which entities are consistently driving early discovery for certain topics.
  • Cross-platform trend alignment indicators: Reveal when multiple social ecosystems signal rising interest at the same time. This helps us strike the iron when it’s hot.

By adding the aforementioned signals, SEOs would be able to anticipate intent shifts earlier and inform content and social teams to draft meaningful and relevant content right away, not after the hype dies down. It’s a win for all teams as your time investment will lead to actual results.

What Marketers Should Do Now

Even though this is a limited test and hasn’t impacted every business (yet),  it would be a good idea for marketers to review their social media channels and strategy to provide an exceptional experience across every channel customers find you.

To prepare, marketers should:

  • Audit which pages receive the most social-driven search traffic. These insights will inform which types of content and topics attract social search visitors most.
  • Align content calendars across social and SEO teams. Start breaking silos between teams by enabling transparency across cross-department initiatives, such as the content calendar. By doing so, you’ll better create a culture of collaboration and give teams shared KPIs to work toward.
  • Repurpose high-performing social content into search-optimized formats (and vice versa). For example, social videos that are performing well in search can be embedded into relevant blog posts, helping you get more value and longevity out of the content you work hard to create. Another example would be user-generated content repurposed into frequently asked questions.
  • Track emerging social trends. Social platforms like TikTok and Instagram can serve as search indicators, allowing marketers to anticipate what consumers are interested in most and what’s capturing their attention.
  • Integrate hybrid analytics into your measurement tracking. AI is having an impact on marketing; however, humans still play a key role in any and every marketing endeavor. Machine-driven insights may give us data at our fingertips; however, human interpretation and validation are still a must. Only humans have the power and foresight to assess nuance, emotions, and insider knowledge, far better than any machine ever could.

Next Steps To Take With Social Channel Insights

Google’s rollout of Social Channel Insights in GSC may seem like a minor advancement, but it’s more than just additional metrics to track for marketers. It signifies how Google is considering how the two disciplines share insights.

Search engines are factoring in the rise of discovery and influence taking place on social media channels. By bridging the gap, and working more closely together, social media marketers and SEOs should see each other as partners rather than once in a while collaborators. The result? Better workflows, collaboration, visibility, and business impact.

Marketers who embrace a cross-collaboration mentality with SEOs will be better poised to appear in the moments that matter, being discovered and chosen.

More Resources:

Featured Image: MR.DEEN/Shutterstock

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Jan 14 2026
Social Media Trust Is Breaking Down (And How You Can Rebuild It) via @sejournal, @donutcaramel13

Social media is an integrated part of life in the U.S., with usage growing among adults. Pew Research Center reports that YouTube (84%) and Facebook (71%) remain the most widely used platforms for U.S. adults, followed by 50% of adults using Instagram.

What we should pay attention to is that people’s trust levels have changed. Americans turn to social media for local news and product research, but no longer trust every voice equally. According to Pew Research, trust in national and local news organizations is declining across all age groups. According to Ipsos Global Trustworthiness Monitor, only 22% of the public trusts social media companies.

With bots, fake reviews, and undisclosed AI-generated content flooding channels, authenticity becomes more essential than ever.

As trust in platforms’ ability to moderate or surface credible information has weakened, many users now look to individual creators they already trust, to help interpret or contextualize information, rather than relying solely on platform-level controls or algorithms. This is an opportunity for creators who can provide credibility.

This article takes a closer look at the factors that lose people’s trust, what rebuilds it, and what marketers can do to ensure they stay trusted.

What’s Not Working

Perfection and over-engineered AI-generated content are not what resonates with audiences and users. Companies that forget to be human-first could find their campaigns backfire, as in the case of this AI firm that commissioned a billboard featuring an AI employee and the tagline: “Stop Hiring Humans.” And Coca-Cola with its AI-generated holiday ad.

To keep building human-focused content and to engage with your audience through authenticity, avoid the following:

Overly Polished Content & Using AI Models

Audiences are quick to recognize overly “clean” content and AI models. While they’re usually a very engaging brand, Ryanair’s recent AI-generated TikTok didn’t land with people (pun intended):

@ryanair

catch a grip 🙄 #ryanair

♬ original sound – Ryanair

If you read some of the negative comments, they focused on how disappointed people are with the airline service. One commenter remarked, “Why is Ryanair using AI?” and another user added, “Saves money. That’s all they care about.”

For a brand that is usually so self-effacing and quick to respond, this time, it looks like they missed the opportunity to be themselves and connect.

While it is true that AI can save more money (according to a survey conducted by Ahrefs, human-written content costs 4.7x more than AI-generated content), it reduces believability.

Consider Trivago’s commercial, originally featuring German football manager Jurgen Klopp, who starred in the brand’s AI-powered ads; he was replaced with an AI lookalike to the dismay and confusion of viewers who posted about it on Reddit. Read the comments on the lookalike video.

Tone Deaf Concepts

While not a social media example, Apple’s “Crush” iPad Pro Ad is an example of a big brand that usually gets it right, getting it very wrong. Apple had to withdraw the ad after negative reactions, even though the production was high-quality and polished. Viewers called it “soul crushing.”

The ad depicted heavy instruments: pianos, guitars, cameras, and paintings, being crushed into a single iPad, suggesting that the thinnest iPad can replace the things that people cherished over hundreds and even thousands of years. But, inadvertently, it dismissed human creativity.

The concept was considered tone deaf and disappointed Apple fans, who are usually such ardent supporters of their creativity.

The example highlights how the right tone is essential to get your audience to connect with your messaging. Users will respond less to generic brand messaging that feels like it was scripted by ChatGPT. Invoking positive emotions in your content that tie in with your brand values should be your focus.

Undisclosed Synthetic Content & The Risk Of Misinformation

According to a study conducted at Rutgers University, public views on AI are mixed: While AI can assist with automation and data analysis, people prefer human storytelling for content. Users can spot AI-crafted texts and scripts easily because of tells like em-dashes and punctuation.

Suspecting undisclosed AI-generated content could drive your users away: Over half (52%) of social media users are concerned about brands posting AI-generated content without disclosing it.

And according to Ahrefs, 62% of respondents cited the biggest perceived risk of using AI as sharing misinformation. In the same study, most people (65%) regard human-written content as higher quality than AI-generated content.

Replacing The Human Touch

While AI can be cost-effective as mentioned above, LLMs erode trust when they replace the writing of lived real experience. As a case in point, there was immediate backlash to Google’s Gemini commercial “Dear Sydney.” A father asks Gemini to help him write a letter to Olympian Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone about how inspiring she is.

Viewers called it sad and disturbing, with one commenting that it “completely negates why someone would write a letter to an athlete or anyone for that matter.”

How Marketers Can Demonstrate Trust

Authenticity will always prevail in marketing. When you’re honest with your users about your product and what you can offer them, your campaigns will resonate more. Aside from avoiding the pitfalls, here are tips that we recommend for a proactive approach:

Collaborate With Micro-Creators And Subject-Matter Voices

According to a Deloitte survey, “roughly 50% of Gen Zs and millennials surveyed say they feel a stronger personal connection to social media creators than they do with TV personalities or actors.”

Meaning good influencer marketing for your niche, demonstrating real product use, pros and cons, and reasoning will help instead of hurting your brand.

Choose Credible Partners Over Famous Ones

Three in 10 U.S. adult social media users say they have purchased something after seeing an influencer or content creator post about it. However, they don’t rely on follower counts for reach to establish trust. Studies find that “authenticity’s direct effect on the number of followers is not statistically significant.”

Choosing a creator to partner with is less about reach and more about how they align with your brand values and their expertise they demonstrate. Select the creator with the expertise to effectively review your product and craft compelling content about it.

According to Influencer Marketing Hub’s Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report 2025, brands are shifting towards nano and micro-influencers for targeted, cost-effective collaborations. It works because smaller creators are widely seen to be more relatable and authentic, showing real product use and reasoning in their testimonials, and are trusted within their communities.

Ensure Transparency And Clear Disclosures

Sprout’s Pulse Survey in Q2 2024 found that 94% of consumers believe all AI content should be disclosed. While there’s no universal law yet, AI-disclaiming brands using AI need to disclose AI content. The FTC released a final rule in August 2024 that banned fake reviews and testimonials. To support responsible content practices, TikTok has labels for disclosing AI-generated content, and Meta began adding “AI info” to video, audio, and image content across their platforms. YouTube requires certain effects and synthetic content to be flagged as “Altered Content” during video creation.

Being transparent about partnerships and brand deals will help increase trust with your consumers. According to Sprout Social, 86% of survey respondents said that they would be more likely to give the company a second chance after a bad experience if it has a history of transparency.

As Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines have reiterated, trust is the crucial component of E-E-A-T, so keep demonstrating that you’re transparent about who is behind your content, maintain a positive reputation, and follow ethical content practices.

Monitor Your Brand Mentions Alongside AI

If you think you’re safe because your brand doesn’t use AI, think again. Users who are disenfranchised with AI may have a negative perception of your brand if they see unofficial ads on AI-generated, low-quality content.

In an email to Marketing Brew, Google spokesperson Nate Funkhouser said, “YouTube doesn’t currently offer advertisers the ability to opt out of appearing next to AI-generated content.”

It’s always good practice to monitor where your brand shows up and disassociate from fake content to remain trustworthy.

Tap Into UGC And Human-Led Brand Presence

Brands still need a human voice and faces to represent them, craft compelling narratives, and convey their messages professionally.

A good example is HubSpot’s Instagram content, which uses its marketing manager to humanize its marketing content (this example is about retargeting ads).

UGC gives your customers a sense of participation and is more trustworthy than content from a third party, since it isn’t commissioned. Not to mention, Google also surfaces more video, forums, and UGC in response to user behavioral shifts in seeking quality content.

Support Community-Led Content

Invest in creators and groups with genuine influence in your category.

Lastly, participate where the conversations happen. Niche communities on Reddit, Discord, and Threads are also great for truly connecting with your audience in a transparent way, while customers benefit by getting transparent feedback. What works in these communities is engaging in conversations, rather than just having them watch streams of your content.

What’s likely to work? Hosting AMAs and helping solve problems using Reddit vs. selling with an AI-generated avatar that misses all emotional connection to your audience? We recommend the former.

Trust Is Being Rebuilt Through People, Not Platforms

Instead of solely investing in AI to generate more creative assets, try partnering with nano-influencers, adding more context and disclosures to your campaigns, and facilitating lively UGC campaigns over communities in platforms like Reddit.

People don’t get inspired by a bot or someone who hasn’t actually lived the experience. Your brand earns your audience’s trust through relatable creators and thoughtfully crafted content.

The brands that win are ultimately the brands that feel more human, and the decision to lean into human-led content is yours.

More Resources: 

Featured Image: hmorena/Shutterstock

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Dec 19 2025
Search & Social: How To Engineer Cross-Channel Synergy via @sejournal, @rio_seo

When your search and social strategies are intertwined, they work together like a well-oiled machine, and your search visibility can multiply.

For years, SEO and social media teams more often than not operated in silos, rarely engaging with each other and never working in tandem. SEO focused on optimizing for the latest Google algorithm update while social media teams worked earnestly to respond to brand mentions.

Today, these functions must merge from parallel paths to transparent collaboration. Audience engagement on social platforms can influence how search engines interpret trust, authority, and relevance.

Google’s Helpful Content evolution highlighted social platforms in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Discussion forums like Reddit and Quora often surface answers to queries at the top of the SERPs, especially answers that have plenty of comments and upvotes.

Current marketing means SEO and social go hand-in-hand, building unified systems to ensure cross-channel amplification is maximized. Together, these two divergent roles work towards the same goal of helping your business rank higher, improve brand recognition, and build a consistent story across every single touchpoint.

Why Search And Social Belong Together

Search and social belong together. They aren’t focusing on divergent tactics; they’re working in unison to compound your marketing and SEO efforts. The marriage of the two helps improve customer experiences from first search to reading reviews to aid in the decision-making phase of the sales journey.

Here’s what that synergy might look like in practice.

1. Social Creates The Spark Of Discovery

A decade ago, traditional blue links reigned supreme. Social media today is “top of the funnel” for organic search. According to GWI, nearly half (46%) of Gen Z turns to social media first when conducting product research. Not Google. But, many of those users will later turn to search to validate and compare what they discovered on social media.

Social media content shouldn’t just be entertaining or chasing the latest viral trend. It must answer questions your customers are asking. Smart marketing leaders analyze trending social conversations to discover the right queries and phrases people are using related to their products or services. They’re then working with SEO teams to optimize for those terms in the form of visual and written content, as well as back-end optimizations.

Knowing that social sentiment is often the early determinant of rising search demand, it’s crucial for CMOs, SEOs, and social marketers alike to watch for engagement spikes around an emerging topic and create high-quality content quickly in order to turn buzz into business.

2. Search Anchors And Sustains The Momentum

Social engagement is fast and fickle. What’s trending one day is quickly forgotten the next. Search visibility, on the other hand, is a slow process that doesn’t happen overnight. Together, they create the right balance of speed and longevity. A social post may receive thousands of comments in a matter of hours, but an optimized landing page built on that same topic can rank and drive sales for years to come.

Consider Gong, which generates roughly 2.2 million visits a month from organic traffic, according to SimilarWeb. The social media platform invests effort into growing its LinkedIn. At the bottom of Gong’s blog posts, they don’t ask their readers to navigate to a demo or related blog post, they invite them to follow their LinkedIn, and their efforts are paying off.

Gong has 315,000 followers on LinkedIn. Its competitor, Chorus, meanwhile, has about a third of the followers. Additionally, Gong shares about 10-15 posts on its company page per week. The velocity has paid off, as many of its posts receive thousands of interactions and hundreds of comments. This type of momentum is what Google favors and pays attention to, making them more likely to be highlighted in the SERPs.

3. Shared Data Creates Precision

When SEO and social data remain separated, it’s impossible to see the bigger picture and extract key takeaways. Integrating both data sets helps marketing leaders identify what’s working and what isn’t. It showcases what content is delivering return on investment and which should be repurposed. It identifies patterns such as posts that earn high engagement but low search volume or blog posts that earn clicks but fail to be shared on social.

By cross-referencing these insights, teams gain a 360° view of their performance. That level of insight fuels smarter creative, better results, and higher ROI.

How To Engineer Cross-Channel Synergy

Bridging the gap between SEO and social teams requires work. When two teams are accustomed to working independently, structure and strategy must come into play. Below are the five tactics to ensure cross-team synergy is as seamless as possible.

1. Share Objectives

Merge SEO and social teams with intent, aligning on KPIs to ensure everyone is working towards the same goal. Creating joint goals, such as brand visibility, intent coverage, and more, helps teams come together to maximize organizational success.

For example, both SEOs and social marketers should work towards visibility, tracking growth of branded keywords, hashtags, and mentions (both on social and search). Joint goals motivate teams to work closely together, turning to one another to pave the path towards success. This shared measurement philosophy removes team rivalry and breeds co-creators of growth.

2. Plan Content Around Signals

Building content around internal agendas rarely works well. Cross-channel listening opens the door to conversions content marketers often aren’t involved in. Social media marketers leverage social listening to detect emotional signals (what people care about now) and SEOs measure search data to discern what users will look for next. Merging the two together enables content marketers to create click-worthy and relevant content that meets audiences exactly where interest turns into action.

Forecasting content identifies future search demand by tracking early-stage social conversations, leading to a strategy that stays well ahead of your competitors.

3. Implement A Content Relay System

Top-performing brands treat search and social as relay partners. They work together for the greater good of the organization and embrace the team player ideology. Here’s how the content relay model works when implemented right:

  1. Social Spark: Social media teams create a thought leadership thread, poll, or conversation starter in hopes of attracting interest and engagement.
  2. Search Foundation: Based on the responses, social hands off those insights to content to produce a more detailed blog or landing page. SEO helps optimize the content to improve the chances of appearing in the SERPs.
  3. Social Reinforcement: Once the piece has been optimized for search, share the content with social with audience-driven context (you asked, we answered/analyzed).
  4. Search Reinforcement: Embed high-performing social content (such as quotes, videos, or user-generated content) into pages for richer signals. Use structured data to tell search engines what the content is and how to index it.

Every piece of content fuels another, creating a loop of engagement, validation, and authority that compounds across platforms and the content’s lifetime extends.

4. Pair AI With Human Expertise

AI isn’t a replacement for human creativity and expertise. It’s merely an aid to help power smarter business decisions. In the case of social media and search, AI-powered tools can be used to help analyze language consistency and detect sentiment shifts. For example, if users are consistently complaining about long wait times at your fast-food chain in Memphis, TN, AI can flag this as an issue that needs to be resolved before your reputation and bottom line suffer.

Similarly, AI can also identify when your top-performing social post is driving branded search volume or when a keyword starts trending related to your products or services in user-generated content. Intelligent automation enables your team to be notified in real time, allowing you to strike while the iron is hot.

5. Align Leadership And Cultural Change

Marketing leaders must create environments where SEOs and social media team members understand why and how they’re working together. This might include:

  • Hosting bi-weekly meetings with both teams to get both teams up to speed on shared goals and priorities.
  • Creating “bridge roles” like Audience Insights Manager.
  • Recognizing shared wins (e.g., content that ranked and went viral on TikTok).
  • Transparency into what both teams are working on and towards
  • In-person team building events to allow both teams to connect outside of work

A good company culture that fosters collaboration is imperative for team building, employee retention, and business success. When collaboration feels like extra work or leaves one team in the dark, performance and employee satisfaction suffer.

6. Embrace An Ecosystem Mentality

Once marketing leaders align data, culture, and goals, your organization’s ecosystem begins to operate like a living, breathing organism. Search informs social, social accelerates search, and together they improve the longevity of your business. In return, your business becomes more resilient to Google’s constant algorithm evolution. Siloed strategy starts to shift from stagnant results to seamless execution.

A Real-World Case: Social And Search Synergy In Action

When I worked with a leading fast-casual Mexican restaurant, the business had seen inconsistent reviews across its hundreds of locations. We centralized customer feedback, identified common complaints and praises, which led to a revamped online reputation.

Within just two months, according to our agency internal rating metrics, the chain’s average star rating rose from 4.2 to 4.4, five-star reviews increased by 32%, and no one-star reviews were left during that time period. Positive feedback trends emerged almost immediately, signaling local teams were acting on customer feedback faster and more diligently.

The ripple effects reached both search and social ecosystems as improved reviews and higher star ratings typically lead to a boost in visibility in Google Search and Maps. Simultaneously, the same credibility fueled social proof across the brand’s social platforms, where patrons frequently leave both positive and negative feedback.

Search visibility was boosted due to review quality, and social visibility was also enhanced because of customer advocacy. Together, they created a unified trust signal that influenced consumer behavior across every touchpoint. That represents the power of marrying search and social; a blissful union that drives favorable outcomes like visibility that converts.

Future-Facing: The Algorithmic Convergence Of Search And Social

We are now in an era where search and social converge effortlessly. TikTok is an influential discovery engine, while Google’s prominent AI Overviews pull in content that resembles social threads. Social content and discussion forums are now indexed prominently in the SERPs.

SEO should maintain semantic and emotional consistency at every step of discovery across the digital buyer’s journey across all channels.

Marketing executives should ask themselves the following:

  • How do we establish a unified signal map? How does your audience move from discovery to intent? Which social triggers lead to which search behaviors?
  • How can we centralize our listening structure? Does our social listening platform allow us to integrate with our search analytics technology?
  • How can we create rapid-response workflows to capitalize on trending topics before our competitors do?
  • Do we need to reevaluate our reporting cadence? How do we move from channel-based reports to intent-based dashboards that track trending topics across platforms?
  • Are we relying too heavily on AI? Do we use human judgment to craft narratives that align with our brand’s voice and ethics?

Search and social are no longer divergent roles that never speak to one another. They’re an integral effort that plays for the same team and can amplify one another to create something bigger and better than either could solo.

More Resources:

Featured Image: SvetaZi/Shutterstock

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Nov 5 2025
How Founders Are Turning Their LinkedIn Posts Into Larger Sales Deals [Webinar] via @sejournal, @itsduhnise

Build Influence, Drive Revenue, and Grow Faster

Your voice is your most underused business asset. 

Founders who post at least 10 times a year on LinkedIn: 

  • Generate 33% more leads.
  • Close deals that are 3.7x larger. 

The data speaks for itself.

In this live webinar, a rockstar team from LinkedIn will share new insights and proven strategies from their latest research on founder-led marketing. You’ll see how the most successful founders are transforming expertise into trust, reach, and revenue.

What You’ll Learn

  • The 3 story types that resonate most with buyers and how to capture ideas without adding hours to your week.
  • A proven approach for creating consistent, high-impact posts that don’t lead to burnout.
  • Which metrics actually matter and how to track real influence across your sales cycle.

Why You Should Attend

You’ll hear how brands like Aligned generated 65% of their leads through founder-led marketing, how Hootsuite’s CEO influenced $15M in pipeline, and how Wynter drove 80% of demo signups through this strategy.

Whether you’re pre-seed or scaling to Series B, this webinar will help you turn your own perspective into your strongest lead-generation engine.

Register now to learn how to use your voice to grow trust, visibility, and deal size.

🛑 Can’t make it live? Register anyway, and we’ll send you the on-demand recording.

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Nov 3 2025
Don’t Let Your Founder Burn Out: 4 Systems To Operationalize Thought Leadership via @sejournal, @purnavirji

In my last article, we covered strategies that turn a founder’s voice into a pipeline driver. The most common follow-up question I get then is about how to do it consistently without burning out.

Every minute a founder spends on LinkedIn is a minute they aren’t building, hiring, or selling. This is the number one reason most founder-led content strategies fail: They start strong, then disappear. Many fail to make it past 90 days.

The data from our LinkedIn (my employer) playbook confirms the stakes: startup director+ who post at least 9x a year see 3x more engagement and 4x more new followers than those who post only once. But trust isn’t built on viral moments. It’s built over time.

That means you’ll need more than inspiration or willpower to go the distance. The solution is to build systems to operationalize your founder’s creativity.

Now, it might sound counterintuitive. Creativity is a nebulous, free-flowing concept. And operationalizing it can sound … restrictive. I promise you it’s not. Think of it as building the foundation and scaffolding to strengthen and support creativity, allowing your founders (or you!) to stay consistent without burning out. And actually enjoy the process along the way.

Here are four systems you can build to maintain consistency.

1. Build A Central Content Bank

Stop hunting for ideas every week and start building a repository.

This shared document – a simple Google Doc or Notion page works fine – becomes your single source of truth that you and your founder can both contribute to.

Your content bank should include:

  • ICP Profiles: Quick reference of customer pain points, objections, and goals.
  • Post Ingredients: Running list of “scar stories,” customer insights, contrarian takes, and company stats.
  • Hook Library: Collection of proven opening lines ready to deploy.
  • “What’s Worked” File: Log of top-performing posts to repurpose formats.

Most importantly, include a “Creative Block” list. When your founder gets stuck, whip out one of these prompts for instant inspiration:

  • “What’s something I wish I knew six months ago?”
  • “What’s a mistake I made this week?”
  • “What’s a customer question I keep hearing?”
  • “What’s a belief I’ve changed my mind about?”
  • “What’s an intelligent risk I took that paid off?”
  • “What most energized me this week?”

This bank is a sanity saver. Rather than stare at blank screens waiting for inspiration to strike, your founder now has a library of proven material ready to deploy.

2. Establish A Repeatable Content Rhythm

Inspiration is fickle. A schedule is reliable.

Help your founder build a repeatable rhythm for content creation by batch creating their content during set content creation time blocks. Gal Aga, CEO of Aligned, blocks off time on Sundays to create his three posts for the upcoming week.

He follows a simple formula:

  • 1 Scar Story (e.g., “We lost $500,000 because…”)
  • 1 Contrarian Take (e.g., “Why [industry belief] is wrong”)
  • 1 Customer Insight (e.g., “What 17 buyers told me about…”)

Another approach comes from Peep Laja, CEO of Wynter, who runs original survey-based research one to two times per month. This system gives him a week’s worth of unique, proprietary content that no competitor has.

The specific rhythm matters less than having one. Pick a day, pick a format, and stick with it long enough to build momentum.

3. Create A “Capture” System

Your founder is already creating content. It’s just trapped in their daily conversations. Your job is to build a system to capture it.

The simplest method? Voice memos.

As humans, we talk faster than we can type. Encourage your founder to record a one- to two-minute voice memo on their phone right after a customer call or whenever an idea strikes. You can then transcribe these notes and turn them into the first draft of a post ready for them to edit. This can save as much as 80% of the writing time and gives you loads more raw material for posts.

A more hands-on approach is to “interview” your founder. As Kacie Jenkins, former SVP of Marketing at Sendoso, explains: “It’s important to work with your exec team to identify how they best think and reflect, and then build on that.”

Book 30 minutes on their calendar, hit record, and ask them questions from your “creative block” list. This gives you authentic, first-person soundbites that can be turned into a week’s worth of text posts and video clips.

The key is reducing friction between having an idea and capturing it. Make it as easy as talking into their phone.

4. Use AI As A System Multiplier

When things get busy, AI can help you maintain consistency. Instead of using it to write posts, use it to operationalize your founder’s insights.

  • Turn voice notes into drafts: Feed an AI tool the transcript from a voice memo and ask: “Summarize this into two to three post ideas” or “What’s the most compelling insight here?”
  • Build your content bank faster: Feed the AI a batch of past posts and ask: “What themes do I keep coming back to?” or “Which ideas could become a series?”
  • Capture their authentic voice: Arvind Jain, founder of Glean, shared how his team took this approach further. They built an AI agent trained on transcripts from his past speaking engagements. Now, every draft runs through the agent for tone and polish before it’s shared, ensuring it sounds authentically like him.

AI doesn’t replace your founder’s thinking or creativity. It removes the friction between their ideas and published content.

Systems Create Stamina

A high-impact founder brand takes months to grow. The initial discomfort of building these systems is the barrier to entry that keeps most competitors out.

Your competitors are waiting for inspiration. By building systems, you create stamina. You reduce friction, align content creation with your founder’s existing work, and build the consistency required to turn their expertise into trust, pipeline, and authority.

The founders who win at this aren’t the most creative or the best writers. They’re the ones who built systems that let them show up consistently, even when inspiration doesn’t.

All data, quotes, and examples cited above without a source link are taken from the “Founder-Led Sales and Marketing Never Ends” playbook.

More Resources: 

Featured Image: Master1305/Shutterstock

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Oct 17 2025
Why Authority In Online Communities Such As Reddit And Quora Matters via @sejournal, @rio_seo

Online communities have infiltrated the internet, appearing at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) for most queries. They play an integral role in shaping brand perception, purchasing decisions, and search visibility.

Reddit now sees more than 110.4 million daily users and 416.4 million weekly active users. Quora, on the other hand, also receives an impressive amount of traffic, with over 400 million active users flocking to the website monthly. Undoubtedly, online communities present an impressive opportunity, yet many marketing leaders have yet to capitalize on it.

This substantial shift towards interest in participating in online communities presents both an opportunity and a risk. Positive benefits a brand can receive from building authority in online communities include enhancing SEO performance, improving share of voice, and delivering real market intelligence. But participation without a solid strategy in place can backfire, damaging reputation in spaces where skepticism runs high and negative sentiment spreads like wildfire.

This article explores why it’s essential to build authority in Reddit and Quora, the brands that got it right (and wrong), and how to operationalize community authority as part of a broader marketing and SEO strategy.

Reddit Marketing Strategy: Building Authority In The Hardest Community

Reddit is one of the most difficult places for marketers to master. It’s a forum where trust is increasingly difficult to earn, and if a brand is perceived as disingenuous or inauthentic, it can be downvoted into obscurity quickly. Reddit community members are quick to express their thoughts about anything and everything, especially when it comes to brands that overtly try to advertise there.

Communities (which are known as “subreddits”) are moderated by members, not brands, and those members are quick to identify anything that sounds too promotional or tone-deaf. They also have the power to ban members entirely from participating in the subreddit. It may sound daunting to engage a Reddit audience; however, the brands that do earn credibility reap the rewards that extend well beyond the platform.

Case Study: Spotify’s AMA Success

Spotify is a prime example of how to master Reddit’s Ask Me Anything (AMA) discussion format. Spotify employees frequently leverage AMA to solicit feedback from users to improve its technology or to address tough technical questions, rather than hard sell playlists or subscriptions.

The result? Thousands of upvotes and long-tail SEO value that still lives on today in popular subreddit communities. Spotify openly invited users to engage directly with the team behind its recommendation engine, and users have a lot to say.

Spotify doesn’t have its marketers join the AMA conversation, but rather engineers who play an active role in how Spotify’s technology works. In turn, Spotify was able to build trust with an audience that might otherwise dismiss a “brand presence” as self-serving, as the SERPs for continued visibility.

For example, a Spotify engineering manager recently asked for users’ input on Spotify’s Lossless feature. The Reddit thread received 1,500 upvotes, four awards, and 451 comments, highlighting the power of engaging with a motivated and receptive community.

Case Study: Woody Harrelson’s AMA Failure

Unfortunately, AMA doesn’t always go according to plan. Perhaps one of the most infamous examples of an AMA gone wrong is with actor Woody Harrelson’s in 2012, which was a prime example of what happens when marketers ignore Reddit’s norms.

Harrelson promoted his film instead of answering questions, which caused a negative chain reaction. The actor received myriad downvotes, ridicule, and lasting negative press. To this day, this specific AMA is often referenced as a cautionary tale of when advertising goes awry.

Read more: Reddit Subreddits To Google Search: Maximizing Your Brand’s Impact

Why You Should Prioritize Reddit

Reddit and Quora, once fringe discussion boards, are now rife with chatter that is actively shaping brand perception, purchasing decisions, and trust. Reddit’s massive potential can no longer be ignored for the following reasons:

SEO Value

According to recent research, the “Discussions & Forums” SERP feature appeared in 7,085 out of the 10,000 studied product-review searches, which equates to about three-quarters (70-75%+) of the time.

Consumers are actively seeking validation before committing to a purchase, and surfacing at the top of the SERPs is a great way to build trust and authority with searchers.

Marketing Funnel

Shoppers are overwhelmed with a plethora of choices. Any time they seek a product or service, there are myriad vendors to vet.

Reddit’s own research states that Reddit is the No. 1 platform where people go to explore possible solutions to their needs, making it a powerful tool for discovering products. Additionally, 71% of people who discovered a brand online or off went to Reddit to conduct their research. 74% of people agree that Reddit assists them in making faster purchase decisions.

Trust Building

Research reveals that over three-quarters (77%) of consumers are willing to spend their money to support an authentic brand over one that’s not. Additionally, Reddit recently reported that 88% of social media users turn to Reddit for purchase decisions, and 76% believe Reddit posts are more honest and truthful than those on other social platforms.

With more users trusting Reddit over other platforms, the opportunity is to empower subject matter experts, engineers, executives, and other powerful voices within their organization to share original insights, host AMAs, and engage authentically with Reddit community members.

Read more: AMA Recap: Reddit Leadership On Leveraging The Platform For Business Success

Quora Marketing Strategy: Long-Tail Authority That Compounds

Quora is an entirely different online community that requires its own distinct strategy. Reddit thrives on thoughtful debate, engaging discussion, and subcultural context, whereas Quora looks for depth, expertise, and intellect.

Quora’s algorithm looks for long-form content and authoritative answers that provide substantial context, cite credible resources, and solve the reader’s challenge succinctly. For example, an in-depth, 1,000-word response that reveals relevant and helpful information will typically outperform a low-effort, dull response.

Like Reddit, Quora also has unique SEO advantages. Thought-provoking, highly regarded content has staying power in the SERPs. Investing in Quora can offer online visibility across numerous platforms, helping boost brand recognition and build long-lasting search equity. Additionally, given the shift in how businesses are appearing in the SERPs with the rise of AI, research from Semrush found that Quora is the most commonly cited website in Google AI Overviews.

Case Study: Staggering Success For CodingNinjas

Quora users don’t want to feel as though they’re shouting into a void. They crave connection, conversation, and relevant responses to their inquiries. CodingNinjas does just that, using Quora in a highly strategic way. After noticing early leads originating from Quora, the team continued to invest in answering questions related to their services and competitors. The result? Within a year, Quora became their No. 1 source of qualified leads, driving consistent organic traffic and improved search engine visibility.

Success came with testing the length of answers as well as aligning with keywords, which helped CodingNinjas determine which content resonated best with their target audience. They found writing content that addressed the final stages of customer awareness, such as solution and product-focused questions, performed best and produced the highest conversions.

CodingNinja’s success highlights how strategic participation in Quora can help boost search visibility and strengthen domain authority through authentic, value-driven writing. Just like Reddit, the better your responses, the better your chance of succeeding in building authority on Quora.

Case Study: Outsourcing Gone Wrong

Outsourcing is a tactic to avoid when engaging with Quora and Reddit community members. Companies that delegate Reddit or Quora participation to third parties often lose brand tone and voice in their responses (see the Woody Harrelson example above). The result is templated, generic responses that often violate community rules and can even lead to bans. Reddit and Quora users actively look for credible, well-cited answers that those who are unfamiliar with your industry and brand may not be able to provide.

Companies that outsource Quora participation often receive unhelpful, keyword-stuffed answers that don’t match brand content standards. In turn, this content can be flagged for low quality and remain unseen by Quora users because of this. Many times, consumers can see through the intent and effort behind these posts and will downvote the content. In some instances, it may result in account suspension, wasting time and money, while also harming credibility.

Why You Should Prioritize Quora

While Reddit is well-known for sparking heated debates and quick responses, Quora rewards depth, expertise, and length. With hundreds of millions of visitors frequenting Quora, the opportunity is to convert these motivated searchers into customers. Here are a few reasons why brands should prioritize Quora:

Search Visibility

Unlike posting on social platforms like Instagram and Facebook, Quora content has the potential to deliver value for lengthy periods of time. As aforementioned, Google’s AI Overviews tend to pull authoritative and quality Quora responses, placing content front and center at the moment searchers are looking for relevant content.

A single, in-depth answer can get eyes on it for years in the SERPs, attracting high-intent searchers long after publication, extending the content’s mileage and funneling a continual stream of new visitors. Quora acts as an evergreen asset, making it a compounding investment that can pay off well beyond its initial posting and a strong potential revenue resource. In comparison, paid ads or sponsored social posts may drive impressions but disappear quickly, offering little lasting equity.

Executive Visibility

For executives looking to boost their digital presence and share their wealth of expertise, Quora is one of the strongest methods for engaging curious consumers.

For CMOs, there’s a clear incentive to position themselves and other leadership team members as authoritative voices on an influential platform. When a CMO, product lead, or engineer answers a strategic question like “What is the future of AI in marketing technology?”, your answer holds weight and doesn’t just position your brand as a thought leader; it also enhances the individual’s personal credibility and positions them as an expert voice on the topic.

The dual benefit – strengthening your company’s reach and authority as well as your thought leaders – makes Quora a powerful and investment-worthy channel for marketing to focus on.

Longevity

A single thought-provoking answer on Quora can consistently attract high-intent readers who are seeking a trustworthy resource to solve their challenge. Alternatively, a sponsored LinkedIn post may receive ample attention but disappear from people’s feeds and minds almost immediately after reading.

Content Pipeline

A high-performing Quora answer may be repurposed into longer form content to get the most mileage, such as a blog post, social media carousel, ebook, and more, helping fuel your content pipeline with high-performing insights. Longer-form content tends to perform better on Quora (1,000+ word answers), so it’s important to focus not only on the quality of your answer but also the length.

How To Make Authority In Online Communities Your Next Competitive Advantage

Given the influx of answers available online for any query, visibility is no longer the determinant of success. Visibility without trust doesn’t retain customers. In online communities, where skepticism is abundant and trust is fleeting and fickle, authority is what ultimately wins.

The lesson is apparent: Online communities can’t be treated as marginal and shouldn’t be forgotten. They must be treated with the same fervor and effort as other more traditional marketing strategies, such as email and pay-per-click advertising. Authority is a strategic asset, one that influences consumers early on in their journeys with your business. Building solid trust extends the lifetime of your customers and turns them into brand advocates.

Authority in online communities is one of the best ways to build trust in an increasingly skeptical consumer purchasing landscape and can:

  • Strengthen E-E-A-T signals (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).
  • Create long-standing, evergreen search assets.
  • Position your brand as a trusted authority in places where consumers are actively seeking advice and reassurance.

The brands that will conquer online communities in the future aren’t chasing volume; they’re seeking authentic relationships and building trust in a highly scrutinized marketplace.

As AI-generated content and recommendations continue to infiltrate the SERPs and, in turn, grow consumer distrust, the brands that build their authority in online communities today will be the ones who own the conversations in the future.

More Resources:

Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Oct 13 2025
Meta Ads Pixel Tracking, Explained

The Meta Pixel is a snippet of JavaScript with powerful implications for advertising performance.

Ecommerce operators are typically experts in their products or industry, but not in advertising. I’ve seen conversion campaigns, for instance, with poor performance because the Meta Pixel was firing on the wrong event.

One merchant went from a 0.3% conversion rate to 27.0% with the correct setup. The difference was not the ad creative, audience targeting, or page layout. It was pixel event tracking.

Pixel Mechanics

The Meta Pixel connects a website and the Meta Ads platform. The process goes like this:

  • A Facebook or Instagram user clicks on an advertisement.
  • The pixel associates the ad click with the website visit.
  • When the visitor completes an action (e.g., a purchase, abandoned cart, page view), the pixel reports back to Meta Ads.
  • Meta learns from that data who is most likely to buy.
  • Meta Ads targets those prospects.

Put another way, the pixel tracks the first purchase, and Meta Ads uses that data to optimize who then sees the ads and the headlines, descriptions, and images.

With each cycle of action and learning, Meta Ads gets better at finding customers for the store.

Better Than Billboards

Imagine a billboard on a busy highway. Thousands of cars pass by each day. But an advertiser on that billboard can only guess or estimate how many folks see or think about the message.

The business does not know:

  • The number of drivers or passengers who looked at it,
  • The billboard’s impact on sales,
  • The most effective part of the billboard (image or text).

Certainly a unique message on the billboard can facilitate tracking, but not with the clarity of a pixel.

Shopify

Shopify offers a plugin for Meta Ads. It also works with Facebook and Instagram Shops.

Screenshot of Shopify's page promoting the Facebook and Instagram integrations

The Facebook & Instagram app for Shopify tightly integrates with Meta Ads.

The plugin uses two methods to connect a Shopify store to Meta Ads. (It also works with Facebook and Instagram Shops.) First is the Meta Pixel. Second is Meta’s Conversion API. Both share similar events from Shopify to Meta, including:

  • PageView,
  • ViewContent,
  • Search,
  • AddToCart,
  • InitiateCheckout,
  • AddPaymentInfo,
  • Purchase.

The pixel sends the data collected in visitors’ web browsers. The API captures events from Shopify directly. Together, the pair answers questions that a billboard could not, such as:

  • What is working (measurement)? For example, 1,000 consumers saw an ad, 50 clicked it, and five made a purchase, resulting in a specific return on ad spend.
  • Who to target next (optimization)? Meta’s algorithm analyzes the five folks who purchased and then automatically shows the ad to millions of others with similar characteristics and behaviors, dramatically increasing ad efficiency.
  • How to improve (insight)? Meta Ads constantly refines targeting and creative combinations based on actual sales, not intuition.

Privacy

A pixel’s potency stems from tracking consumers. Meta (Facebook) has long been a source of privacy concerns, since the company collects loads of personally identifiable information across devices.

When it adds a pixel to its web store, an advertiser essentially invites Meta to track visitors’ on-site behavior — the ads they click, the pages they view, the products they add to the cart, and what they buy.

All of that data goes to Meta’s advertising network, which combines it with information from other sites, apps, and internal portals such as Facebook and Instagram.

The result is remarkably better ad performance, coupled with the need for heightened awareness by advertisers.

Understanding both ad performance and privacy implications allows merchants to make informed decisions, using data wisely without losing the trust of the customers who make businesses possible.

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments