Friday, December 19

🌟 Today’s Highlights:

• Apple’s adding more App Store ads in 2025

• It might be time to get your LinkedIn profile officially verified

• Scale your team faster with Upwork’s latest offer

• 📊 Stat of the Day: Pages ranking for Google’s AI Overview fan-out queries are 161% more likely to be cited than pages ranking only for the main query. (Source: Surfer SEO)

• 💡 Today’s Insight: The best brands on social media in 2025

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⚡️ Today’s Headlines ⚡️

📲 Apple is adding more App Store search ads. The expanded inventory will keep placements driven by relevance, not higher bids. The new ads will appear inline with App Store search results, mixed among organic listings.

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📍 Google added location targeting controls to Demand Gen campaigns. The new location targeting options match the controls already available in Search and gives advertisers more precise geo-targeting.

🤖 Not sure where to use AI in your business? Very few entrepreneurs I speak to have identified exactly where AI actually saves them the most time or money. I had Nathan audit my businesses, identify the highest-ROI AI automations, and build them end-to-end. We now save hours every week across onboarding, reporting, and client comms. See if you qualify for the same free strategy session with him here →

✅ LinkedIn’s profile verification is gaining momentum. Amidst growing concerns about authenticity, adoption of LinkedIn’s verification is up more than 38% year-over-year in 2025 with India emerging as the fastest-growing market.

💡 Today’s Insight 💡

The best brands on social media in 2025

🗞 TL;DR - Sprout Social’s latest Post Performance Report series post reviews and analyzes the brands who crushed it on social media this past year. These are the brands that made users stop mid-scroll, share with others, and generate endless conversation. Keep scrolling to see if your brand made the list…

💡 Insight - The brands building communities on emerging or unexpected platforms:

• FinTech company Ramp managed their own subreddit, which serves as a hub for customer service questions and product feedback, along with AMAs hosted by execs & employees

• Restaurant loyalty company Blackbird created a “secret Substack” that feels like reading the food and culture section of your favorite newspaper – they’ve grown to 11,000 subscribers with regular complementary comments

• Convenience store 7-Eleven is very online on Threads with a “rizz-infused snack” persona, which may only work for a bizarre brand like them

Brands perfecting influencer and creator partnerships:

• LA Metro uses influencers and creators to expand awareness around their efforts to educate citizens about its transit network

• Semrush seized an opportunity with influencers to control the narrative around “the death of SEO”

Brands publishing original content:

• Amtrak showcases their unique (sometimes bizarre) offerings by piggybacking on trends and other cultural moments

• Hotelier Hilton’s “Stay Saves” campaign built a viral social media post into a three-part series featuring hilarious reenactments

Brands acing timely moments and trends:

• Dunkin’ always rises to the top of this category and this year was no exception, from remaking their logo with the latest Taylor Swift album to recreating Severance scenes, to jumping on The Secret Life of Mormon Wives popularity.

To see the full list of brands who crushed it on social in 2025, check out Sprout Social’s full piece here.

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