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In The Headlights: September 4, 2019 Issue

In The Headlights

At our talks this week at both INBOUND and Content Marketing World, we’ve got a lot to share on applications of AI in marketing, but I wanted to share something more high-level that reframes the power of AI as it applies to you and me – not as marketers, but as people.

For the longest time, we have been limited by our abilities. How many of us have heard over the years, “Oh, you’ve got a novel in you” or “You should try singing, you have a great natural voice” – and then we go try the thing and find out it’s not for us. Or worse, we try the thing, we want it to be our thing, but our abilities, our latent talent isn’t enough. It’s discouraging at best and heartbreaking at worst.

What AI offers us is the ability to break through our limitations in ways never before possible.

You can’t write well, but you can frame out the basic ideas of your book? AI will help write the rest with tools like GPT2.

You can’t draw, but you can sketch out roughly what you had in mind? Tools like NVIDIA’s Gaugan allows us to sketch poorly and convert our Microsoft Paint-esque scrawlings into photo-realistic works of art.

You can’t play any instruments, but you know what you like to listen to? AI will compose music with tools like AIVA that make songs with our parameters, but without needing our talent.

We become limited only by our ambitions instead of our talent. So while AI may take away some tasks from our workday, it will allow us to create and unleash the art and beauty inside our hearts.

That’s a future I look forward to.

The Bright Idea

This week’s Bright Idea are the early returns for Content Marketing World and INBOUND. We enjoy making network maps of events to understand who’s most talked about, rather than who does the most talking. This week, whether you’re at the events or not, check in daily on our network maps for both events to see who’s making a splash.

Rear View Mirror Data

In the rear view this week, we revisit Instagram’s engagement rates, one of our most popular blog posts ever. We now look at the year to date and find that Instagram’s engagement for brands is leveling out after a tumultuous first half of the year.

Instagram Chart

We see the engagement rate for brands leveled at 0.42%; this equates to 4.2 people out of every 1,000 engages with a brand Instagram account.

What do you do with this information? Compare it to other forms of engagement like clickthrough rates in emails and ads, benchmarking engagement for different kinds of content.

Methodology: For brands, we tracked 4,123 brands with audiences of at least 100 followers that posted in 2019 year to date on Instagram using Facebook’s Crowdtangle software. The sample size of posts for brands was 1,080,907 unique posts. The timeframe of the study is January 1, 2019 to August 26, 2019. The last 3 days of the dataset were excluded (August 27-30) to allow for post engagements to mature, due to the Instagram feed algorithm. Stories of any kind are not included because analytics are not available in the Crowdtangle API for stories.

In Case You Missed It
Shiny Objects

Shiny Objects is a roundup of the best content you and others have written and shared in the last week. It uses machine learning for the automated one-sentence summaries.

Social Media Marketing

Media and Content

  • How to Export and Import Users in WordPress: All of the plugins for exporting user data will let you bulk export users in WordPress.
  • The importance of an effective review management workflow: Remember, your customers will more often than not use Google to search for reviews, so once youve worked through the more basic platforms, carry out some research of other review platforms that tend to appear when typing in your brand and reviews as well as your service or product and reviews search queries into Google.

Tools, Machine Learning, and AI

Analytics, Stats, and Data Science

SEO, Google, and Paid Media

Business and Leadership

Join the Club

Are you a member of our free, private Slack group, Analytics for Marketers? Join 500 like-minded marketers who care about data and measuring their success. Membership is free – join today.

Upcoming Events

Where can you find us in person?

  • Talkwalker, September 2019, New York City
  • MarTech East, September 2019, Boston
  • MarketingProfs B2B Forum, October 2019, Washington DC

Going to a conference we should know about? Reach out!

FTC Disclosure: Events with links have purchased sponsorships in this newsletter and as a result, Trust Insights receives financial compensation for promoting them.

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