Most every marketer already does:
- SEO
- PPC
- Remarketing/Social/Display ads
- Content
That's why it's hard to get a competitive advantage in these. Your competition is already there.

For 4 years, I've suggested a different channel: marketing through sources of influence. This is especially effective in B2B, where a few dozen to few hundred individuals, sources, and publications tend to have outsized impact on a field.

But, it also works in B2C, e.g. consumer products for foodies like me:

How to cheat your way to the top-rated presentation at any marketing conference.

Because, if you're gonna spend hours making a deck, getting stressed, flying there & back, and probably getting the latest Covid variant, you might as well be the highest-rated speaker.

13 steps: #1: Don't include tips or tactics that more than 20% of your audience already knows.

It's fine to present stuff early adopters have seen, but if you're regurgitating advice that can be found on the popular blogs & newsletters, you won't win the top spot.

A number of reporters have reached out to @SparkToro asking about the "Joe Biden fake followers" story. So, much as we'd like to get back to work on our actual business...

A brief thread on that front. @sparktoro It appears a Newsweek reporter kicked this off by running our free, Fake Followers tool on the @POTUS account (not on @JoeBiden).

That account did not inherit the previous President's followers (washingtonpost.com/technology/202…), so the 22.3M followers there are from the last ~18 months.

On Friday, @ElonMusk said his deal to acquire Twitter was on hold pending an analysis of "spam/fake" accounts.

We've now completed an analysis of 44,058 public Twitter accounts who've tweeted in the last 90 days. 19.42% are likely spam or fake.

Details: sparktoro.com/blog/sparktoro… @elonmusk For those who don't like to click, a brief summary thread.

First, in order to minimize sampling bias, we used the largest, non-Twitter-owned dataset we knew of: @followerwonk. From 1B+ profiles, @semifor pulled 155M that matched our criteria, then extracted a randomized ~45K.

For those asking, @caseyhen is looking into @sparktoro's database to see if we can provide a concrete estimate of total "fake" accounts on Twitter.

But FYI - our methodology includes not just bots, spam, fraud, and disinfo, but also non-active accounts.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1525049369552048129

@caseyhen @sparktoro Update: we expect to publish data this afternoon/evening showing a true estimate.

Preliminary analysis is that "in the range of 18% to 25% of accounts on Twitter are fake/inactive."

VCs: young, white, male entrepreneurs are the "best" startup founders. It's not bias, it's smart "pattern-matching."

The data: None of that is true. Being young, white, and male is not even positively correlated with better outcomes.

You want receipts? /1 "(Our data) refutes the notion that males or younger entrepreneurs perform better than females or older entrepreneurs."

- from a Berkeley published analysis of 14,397 successful startups over the last 20 years: ipira.berkeley.edu/sites/default/…

/2

Last week, we launched a new explainer video for SparkToro. It's now on the homepage, and I've had a lot of questions like:

How much did that cost?
How long did it take?
Did you do that yourselves?
What was the goal?
Has it had a positive impact?

Short thread with answers. How much did it cost?

~$25,000

But, we saved a lot of money by having a flexible schedule, unpaid cast (just me & @caseyhen) and working with a producer/director who are seeking to build up a portfolio of examples (side note: I love working in this way—startup to startup).

Pssst.. Customer research and audience research are *not* the same thing.

Customers = people who've already bought from you.
Audience = people who may become future customers, or might influence your future customers.

5 big mistakes folks are making here: Mistake #1: Interviewing/surveying customers, then assuming those findings apply to the rest of your audience

Not necessarily! Your customer acquisition has bias (demographics, acquisition channels, tactics, etc). Any customer research findings will inherit these same biases.

Yesterday, we released Demographics data in SparkToro. The response has been... incredible.

Seriously, just look at this Profitwell graph. We've had nearly as many signups in the last 36 hours as all of May. 😍

What all is in Demographics? Here's a look... Basically, Demographics aggregates attributes from anonymized, public profiles (we crawl the web just like Google, then put it together in non-ID-able ways).

When I search for profiles that contain "high school teacher," SparkToro has 12,369 matching profiles.

This looks like just an ordinary chat between me and @caseyhen, but it's way more.

This is us delaying a planned @sparktoro launch. It's the kind of decision that would have taken hours, maybe days of painful meetings & process at my last company.

We did it in 3 minutes. In bigger orgs, that pain is part of life. Managers make promises to execs. Execs make promises to the CEO.

The ICs who need longer to feel comfortable about testing things are under way more pressure from internal politics. It's no one's fault, that's just how orgs function!

Let's say your only goal in life is to maximize your (or your employees') productivity.

Not a great way to live, IMO, but even if that's all you care about: hustle culture, long workweeks, 12 hour days are *still* the wrong way.

Why? Because humans don't work this way. Ever come back from vacation to an overwhelmed tasklist, only to find that you've pounded through 2 weeks of work in only 2-3 days?

Yup. Because rest makes us more efficient, more able to process complexity, more accurate. In short, more productive versions of ourselves.

Most marketing is just throwing $$ at Facebook & Google. With high enough margins, it can work. But, it's far from efficient.

The only thing you're really saving: effort.

FB & GG make it easy to spend more. Sure, you see less ROI / $, but at least you're not working hard.
/1 Channels outside FB/GG (and Amazon if you're e-commerce) are:
- More challenging
- More research-intensive
- More effort per conversion

But, also:
- Create competitive advantage (b/c your competition probably isn't doing it)
- Higher ROI
- Boosts your FB/GG efficacy, too
/2

For only the second time (that I can recall), I've had a confirmed talk cancelled due to my slides being heavily critical of Google & Facebook.

I won't out the organizer, but I thought I'd share the offending slides here. I'll go slide-by-slide, so you can get context.

Basic gist: There's 3 reasons to diversify your marketing efforts and expand beyond just Google and Facebook (where the vast majority of marketing dollars and effort are currently spent).

Quick thread about zero-click data and Google's response.

1) Both my research with @SimilarWeb and Google's blog post said the same thing—Google is sending out more traffic to websites than ever before. That's good news for web creators of all kinds.

/1 2) I agree that there are many reasons for zero-click searches. Some aren't concerning at all. The most worrisome are those in spaces where Google's used their search dominance to enter a new field (travel, video, local reviews, jobs, lyrics, finance, & too-many-more).

/2

After answering 626 emails about how to get value from SparkToro, here's my #1 tip.

Say you want to market to health execs & analysts who review drug price information. Very niche group, right?

You might be tempted to search for "my audience talks about drug pricing"...
/1 But, stop a sec and think about who talks about drug pricing online. *Talks about,* not "searches for."

It's a very wide audience, 99% of whom probably aren't healthcare execs dealing with drug prices for insurance & hospitals. I.E. probably not your audience.

Instead...

/2

Answered ~35 emails in the last hour, but replies coming in faster than I can clear 'em out today...

I'm an inbox zero addict, so it's gonna be a late night! 67 minutes later... Some progress. Gotta keep grinding, but also need to make sure I'm sending thoughtful, useful replies.

The team from @RivalIQ released their 2021 Social Media Benchmarks Report today. For years, it's been my go-to in the field.

The big story is the consistent decline of avg. engagement.

E.G. Instagram's median engagement rate in 2018 was 1.73% In 2019, that falls to 1.60%, a drop of ~8%.

Keep in mind that Instagram has the *highest* avg engagement of networks in the report. For comparison, in 2019:
Facebook - 0.09%
Twitter - 0.045%

Yikes.

My grandmother passed away Sunday morning, so she can no longer tell you the story about how she met @jonbonjovi. But I can.

She's on the right (and me in my dad's Saturday-Night-Fever-suited arms). Sometime in the early-mid 90s, she met Mr. Bon Jovi on a local highway.

THREAD My grandma (Pauline, pictured here with her husband @sifishkin and my little bro, @eFishkin) had been driving a giant, white, Oldsmobile Toronado for close to 20 years.

But one sunny day along a scenic, somewhat deserted NJ highway, the beast of a vehicle craps out.

Dear startup founders & product builders,

The whole idea of "product-market fit," i.e. that there's some magical, universal, knowable tipping point for when you should stop improving your product and start marketing it, is dumb.🤪

A thread. Sometime in early 2000s, VC-types wanted a way to say:

"I don't think your product resonates w potential buyers, but I'd rather not give you a metric, b/c then you might cross that hurdle, and it'll be awkward when I say no again."

Thus, "product-market fit" was born. 🤓

This is the website of my favorite pasta company: benedettocavalieri.it/en/

I would now like to talk about the meeting that determined the website's design & content. I have lots of experiences with Italian relatives & inlaws, so I'm pretty sure I know what happened. First off was a lengthy discussion about the pasta shapes were to fly into the screen. There was great agitation and disagreement about which shapes would make the cut, and even more contention over the velocity and direction of each one.

~16 hours ago, sparktoro.com launched our most-requested feature: contact info. Quick thread about how to use it.

Step 1) Define & search for your audience.

e.g. Say you're doing marketing for a co-working space in Raleigh... Step 2) Determine my marketing tactics, and find the sources that'll help me achieve 'em.

e.g. Our co-working space might decide that sponsoring podcasts+webinars plus outreach to influential folks in the Raleigh startup/business community is their starting point.