Use this data to get ahead of your competition…
Three little things to help you stay ahead on social media.
Hey!
I have three things in store for you today:
An update on the state of social media and the latest data you need to know
How we can use AI to truly understand our audiences
A special announcement you won't want to miss
Part 1: April’s Social Media News
This month has been dominated by LinkedIn data. Multiple reports show impressively strong engagement and overall impression growth across the platform.
Looking at the numbers, growth is strong across all account sizes but is particularly pronounced in larger accounts. This growth in impressions is being driven by specific post types:
Multi-image posts: Fantastic for generating likes
Document/Carousel posts: Great for generating comments and shares (deeper engagement)
Videos: Incredibly strong for impressions and overall reach
Polls: Performing exceptionally well across all metrics
What's fascinating about polls is how few actually appear in feeds despite their strong performance. This could be an interesting opportunity to explore for your content strategy.
Also noteworthy this month is the growth of nano-influencers. While influencer marketing has been established for some time, it's increasingly becoming more prevalent in B2B. The market is shifting toward micro-communities - those small and nano-influencers who carry genuine advocacy for brands, products, or services.
In response to these shifting trends, Instagram has improved their Creator Marketplace with AI recommendations allowing brands to more easily connect with influencers. Expect to see more marketers invest in AI to help find the right influencers for their brands.
Part 2: 5 Steps to Truly Understand Your Customer with AI
I often find myself in conversations with marketers discussing the future of marketing in an AI world. Many are fearful about how AI will start taking over our tactical work.
But I think we're missing the bigger picture: AI is our creative enabler, helping us understand the most important aspect of marketing - customer empathy. My belief is that marketers should be the true experts on customers, with the deepest understanding of the problems they face.
AI now allows us to develop this understanding more effectively. Here are five tools I recommend to gain a crystal-clear understanding of your audience:
1. OpenAI Deep Research
Deep Research is like having a PhD researcher on your side. Most businesses can't afford dedicated researchers, but now we can get in-depth research that helps us get to the heart of an industry and increase our contextual awareness. While not meant to be used in isolation, it's an excellent starting point for building a foundation of solid information.
2. LLM-Generated Synthetic Personas
Using large language models like ChatGPT or Claude to create synthetic personas gives us new perspectives on the problems we're trying to solve. In this approach, we use AI as a teammate to imagine customer perspectives.
For example, we can ask Claude to imagine it's a Jaguar customer and provide reactions to Jaguar's messaging. This gives us a way of gaining additional insights and differing perspectives on our messaging and campaigns.
3. Agent AI's ICP Builder
Agent.AI is a platform offering AI agents to solve particular problems. While this marketplace contains many free tools, I particularly like the ICP Builder. This helps us understand our audience's preferences and motivations, but most importantly, where they spend their time online.
Social media success is increasingly driven by who you collaborate with and which spaces you appear in. When aiming to create a channel strategy that delivers results, understanding where people hang out and what motivates them becomes crucial. The ICP generator allows us to simply input names and job roles of our target audience, and it will provide suggestions about their preferences and motivations.
4. Analyzing Your Own Customer Data
After conducting AI-based research, we need to overlay actual customer data. Upload your top-performing posts, call transcripts from your sales team, and customer reviews into Claude or OpenAI and ask questions like:
What are the interesting findings here?
What would surprise me?
Where are the correlations between what customers say and which posts perform well?
This helps us understand what truly moves our customers in real life.
5. Market Insights Through Reddit Analysis
Reddit can be an absolute gold mine of information, but it's messy and time-consuming to navigate. AI helps us understand sentiment across Reddit efficiently.
Having built a foundation through AI research and overlaid our own performance data, we can now capture broader market sentiment. There are several approaches:
Use Appify to scrape Reddit data and feed it into ChatGPT or Claude for analysis
Use workflow tools like Gumloop to scrape Reddit and send you triggered email insights
By following these five steps, you'll have a solid method for gaining true insights supported by AI but ultimately guided by your intuition.
Business, product, and marketing success are all driven by a deep understanding of our audience, their motivations, and the problems they face. In a world where products are increasingly commoditised, understanding our audience is the differentiator that creates a defensible moat for our brand.
Part 3: How to Use AI to (Truly) Transform Your Marketing
If we’re only working with AI in a tactical context, we’re missing a trick. The real opportunity lies further upstream. It's about how we use AI to interrogate data, generate insights, and develop understanding that wasn't possible before. This allows us to unlock a different level of customer understanding.
AI becomes transformative when we move beyond simply automating content creation to using it as a tool for deeper audience understanding and strategic decision-making.
Join Us: HubSpot AI Marketing Masterclass
In partnership with HubSpot, we're bringing you insights on how to revolutionise the way you interpret and act on data.
Join the masterclass on April 24th at 3 PM BST to learn from experts who understand how to capture the opportunities AI offers.
In this masterclass, you'll discover:
How to build unified data strategies
Methods for delivering 1:1 personalisation at scale
Ways to transform AI into your ultimate marketing assistant
Don't miss this opportunity to elevate your marketing strategy with actionable AI insights from the leaders in the field. (This session is only available live and not on-demand)
The future of marketing belongs to those who understand how to leverage AI for deeper customer insights, not just faster content creation.
(This segment on the Hubspot masterclass is part of a paid partnership. But I just know how much value will be packed into it, so I am very happy to recommend it)