April 26, 2024

This Week's Top Marketing News

How to Create a Social Media Calendar to Plan Your Content

How about creating a little structure around your life? Like the best sports moms, you need a schedule to get you where you need to be.

Enter your social media calendar, which maps out your entire season, err social campaigns. I don’t know about you, but I work best seeing it all plotted out day by day.

We prefer a month-at-a-glance calendar, but an Excel sheet works, too.

HubSpot rounded up some of the best free - and paid - tools for your social media calendar. In the blog, they discuss:

What is a social media calendar?
Benefits of Using a Social Media Content Calendar & Content Planner
How to Create a Social Media Calendar
Social Media Templates
Social Media Calendar Examples
Social Media Content Calendar Tools to Plan Your Messaging
How To Create a Social Media Posting Schedule for Your Business
How To Create a Content CalendarWhat is the best social media calendar?

Fish Food: The color coding on some of these templates is great for that “at a glance” picture, especially if you have multiple campaigns. It helps if these social media calendars and templates integrate with your current social platforms—but if not, a trusty Excel CSV file can help! If you are struggling with social media, consider using a calendar template to help you plot it out.

Think Like a Golfer To Create a Winning Content Strategy

Start thinking about your content strategy in terms of your Golf game. Golf is a game of efficiency and the player who executes the least amount of work (strokes) wins. Of course, this requires carefully executing the shots that you do take. Robert Rose applies the concept of golf to content marketing suggesting creating just enough quality content to deliver the intended value and generate the behavioral change you seek.

Google Answers Whether Having Two Sites Affects Rankings

Google’s John Muller answers questions about having two sites and whether it affects rankings. Muller explains that having two separate sites isn’t usually the issue, but having two awesome websites is often difficult. Rather than spreading your efforts thin across more than one site, concentrate on making one website the best it can be.

Google Confirms Links Are Not That Important

Have you heard how backlinks are the key to dominant search rankings? You might want to rethink this strategy. Links used to play an important role in ranking, but 2 top Google employees say links don’t play a large role anymore in rankings on Google. Google’s John Mueller said focusing on links is a waste of time. At a conference, Google’s Gary Illyes said, ' Over the years, we’ve made links less important.’ Google also removed the word “important” from an update about ranking signals, March 2024 Core Update.

5 Lessons from a Conversation With a World-Renowned Happiness Expert

"Relationship satisfaction at age 50 was the greatest predictor of physical health at age 80."

Dr. Waldinger is the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest-running study on adult life, health, and happiness in the world. He recently had a conversation with Sahil Bloom and his simple advice could be the key to your overall health and happiness.

It’s relationships. How you view your relationships and the time and attention you put into them could be the key to your overall health. Dr. Robert Waldinger lists four lessons he spoke on during their conversion.

Lesson 1: Relationship Satisfaction Impacts Health - Relationship satisfaction was a more effective predictor of health at age 80 than cholesterol, blood pressure, or any other health marker tracked by the study.

Lesson 2: Loneliness Kills - Lack of social connection is worse for your health than tobacco and alcohol abuse, obesity, and more.

Lesson 3: Make “Social Fitness” a Priority - Plan a dinner with friends and take the trip

Lesson 4: Check Your Energy to Improve Your Life - Spend more time with your energy creators and less time with your energy drainers.

Lesson 5: Ambivalent Relationships are the Most Toxic - Audit your relationships. Consider those that may have ambivalent characteristics—people who are supportive at times but deeply demeaning at others. It may be time to reduce the energy given to these people.

Fish Food: Relationships are everything. Investing in the good ones and limiting interactions with energy-draining relationships can improve your overall health.

How B2B Leaders Are Planning and Managing Investments [Infographic]

Many B2B companies can be reserved about a LinkedIn strategy due to the cost of running campaigns on a professional platform. This isn’t a cheat code but it is a way to optimize your LinkedIn strategy to get the best bang for your buck. This infographic from LinkedIn highlights tips and LinkedIn tools you can incorporate as you plan your B2B marketing, launch your campaigns, and demonstrate your impact.

10 Best Sales Goal Tracker Tools & Templates

The best way to crush your sales goals is to have a great way to measure them. HubSpot has several free and paid tools and templates to help you keep track of your sales progress. These can help you know how many leads are being worked on and help you evaluate the leads by cost and production.

Picture of Capital building with American flag in the background.

US House Passes Revised Bill To Ban TikTok Or Force Sale

TikTok is bringing up the rear of Fish Bowl Friday, mostly because it seems like a lot of hot air.

President Biden signed a foreign aid package that included a bill banning TikTok if its China-based parent company ByteDance fails to divest the app within a year. The company has an initial nine months to negotiate a deal, though the president could extend that another three months if he sees progress.

TikTok has already stated it will challenge the law in the court.

China entered the chat, saying it strongly opposes a forced sale of TikTok and it has revised its export control rules to give it the power to block a sale on national security grounds.

There are a lot of myths surrounding TikTok (According to TikTok)

TikTok, is not headquartered or available in mainland China. They have established Los Angeles and Singapore as headquarters to meet their business needs.
It’s 60% owned by Global companies, 20% by employees and 20% by the founder.
Three of TikTok's five board members are US-based.
China holds a 1% stake in Douyin Information Service Co., Ltd, a subsidiary of ByteDance, China’s version of TikTok.

Fish Food: Nothing appears to be happening in the immediate future. Even if a forced sale does happen, it will likely take longer than the outlined 12 months to complete such a large and complex deal. The 7 million businesses that use TikTok can continue post and create content on the platform. Oh, and regular ol’ Americans can still get their fill of viral dances and content from the clock app for the foreseeable future.