Link building programs get no links 1/3 of the time; Tuesday’s daily brief

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Good morning, Marketers, and social media platforms are finally giving us what we want!

That is, according to rumors across the web for devs who are finding secret code. It looks like we’ll soon be able to post directly from the browser on Instagram and there’s also the possibility for an Undo Send button for Twitter!

These are things users and marketers have been asking for, and it makes me wonder what the point of critical mass is for their developers. Do enough feature requests have to come in for these to finally be considered on the project docket? Or is it more like, “We got the other things out of the way, so let’s work on this now, I guess.”

Either way, it’ll be helpful for audiences, social media marketers, and social media marketing SAAS tools to have these features. 

Carolyn Lyden,
Director of Search Content

Most people believe that links are still a top signal to Google

That’s one of the main takeaways from The State of Link Building Report from Aira. As people are working on their links to help improve their rankings, here are some of the other major takeaways:

• The most popular link building tactic is content-led link building
• Success for a content-led link building campaign was up to 40 links and a third of people have had a campaign completely flop and get zero links
• Only 10% of agencies and freelancers said that they’d seen demand for link building decrease over the last 12 months

Why we care. Link building isn’t going anywhere. Links are definitely still a major signal to Google, but it’s also interesting to see that maybe we haven’t all got it figured out 100% of the time. Driving links with content is the most natural way to build those new links and keep them coming, but it’s not a home run every time. Take heart in knowing that there are some campaigns that get NO links. We’re all figuring it out as we go.

Jennifer Hoffman joins Ryte as Industry Advisor

Ryte announced yesterday that Jennifer Hoffman has joined the company as Industry Advisor. SEO industry veteran Jennifer Hoffman will use her expertise to help support Ryte’s plans to grow in the UK.

Jennifer Hoffman boasts a strong track record in SEO. A former Marketing Director at DeepCrawl, she was a key member of the executive team that helped steer the organization through multiple funding rounds and establish the company as one of the leading SEO companies in the UK and beyond.

Rumors we hope are true: Instagram testing support for browser-based posting

Instagram has always been a mobile-based application. Eventually you could look at images on browsers, but you’ve never been able to post from your laptop. It’s caused some issues for social media posting software, too. And, until fairly recently, only a few social applications had figured out how to post without having a manual Instagram posting mechanism. Annoying for social media managers, to say the least.

“Developer and leaker Alessandro Paluzzi has discovered Instagram code that strongly suggests the Facebook-owned platform is already working on the ability to upload photos and videos from a desktop web browser,” wrote Tim Hardwick for MacRumors. “Based on images Paluzzi shared on Twitter, browser-based Instagram users could soon be offered the ability to natively drag and drop photos and videos from their computer for upload, as well as crop the content, apply filters, and compose accompanying text for publishing to the social network.”

Why we care. Well, firstly, it’ll just be easier overall to use Instagram when we can manage it from a desktop or laptop device. Next, the implication for when this does finally release is that it could be much easier for social media marketing tools to organize, post, and manage content there. Here’s to hoping the dev rumors are true!

GA4 struggles, podcast ROI and ARE WE GETTING AN UNDO TWEET BUTTON?

Google whisperer’s guide to streams in Google Analytics 4. “Since Google Analytics 4 rolled out last October I get daily escalations saying it isn’t tracking due to the stream not being set up properly – so I built a guide to help out set up,” tweeted SMX speaker Colleen Harris.

How marketers can get the highest ROI out of podcasts. Research has shown that brands that advertise their products and services or business podcasts enjoy an increase on purchase intent, and major platforms are seeing significant increases. Aside from using podcasts as an advertising channel, how can marketers use podcasts to achieve the highest ROI? One option is to recognize that the content can be leveraged beyond the podcast itself.

FINALLY: “Twitter is working on ‘Undo Send’ timer for tweets,” tweeted Jane Manchun Wong. We can’t wait. Our future typos don’t stand a chacne… A cahcne… A CHANCE.

GPT-3’s free alternative GPT-Neo is something to be excited about

GPT-3 has been a topic of conversation in SEO and PPC for a minute. There are almost endless possibilities for search marketers if we can get it to the point where it can produce cohesive, real-sounding copy. There’s also the hiccup of a lack of access for everyone who may want it.

Well, someone has been working on that. “Stella Biderman, Leo Gao, Sid Black, and others formed EleutherAI with the idea of making AI technology that would be open source to the world. One of the first problems the team chose to tackle was making a GPT-like language model that would be accessible to all,” wrote Abhishek Iyer for VentureBeat.

The key was finding the computing power, as the code was already available to them. Once they were able to do that — they were good to go! So how does it work? “EleutherAI reports that GPT-Neo outperformed the closest comparable GPT-3 model (GPT-3 Ada) on all NLP reasoning benchmarks… GPT-Neo was able to generate a coherent, almost-believable article without missing out on the central themes” said Iyer.

While neither are perfect yet, the bottom line is “GPT-Neo is a great open source alternative to GPT-3, especially given OpenAI’s closed access policy,” wrote Iyer. An exciting option for marketers looking to test it out!