By Megan Poinski

AI chatbots are not created equal. Chatbot developers at competing companies often place a different emphasis on what gets suggested, the sources that are used, and how they intend the user to act on the information presented. In a new report, SEO consulting firm BrightEdge dove into the differences between Google’s AI Mode and ChatGPT. While both gave similar responses to basic comparison questions, they took different tactics when users asked for actions.

“AI search is no longer one thing—it’s splitting into at least two distinct philosophies,” BrightEdge founder and CEO Jim Yu says in the report.

When asked for advice to accomplish a certain task, BrightEdge found that Google tends to surface more things to read and learn from. ChatGPT, meanwhile, often suggests tools and apps to do the task. For example, with a prompt asking how to find a doctor, Google provided directions to a hospital. ChatGPT suggested users try Zocdoc, an app with medical professional listings and information. When asked how to learn Python, Google directs users to GitHub and Medium blogs, while ChatGPT suggests online course site Udemy. And a query on how to make a budget has Google sending users to NerdWallet research and blog posts, while ChatGPT suggests financial apps including Mint and YNAB.

BrightEdge also looked into the differences between results from Google’s AI Overviews—the curated information that shows up at the top of several search result pages—and Google AI Mode—the new button to the right side of the search bar. AI Overviews are constantly changing, but showcase brands in 43% of queries. They also can include 20 or more inline citations. AI Mode, on the other hand, surfaces brands in 90% of its responses, and it’s 3.8 times more likely to feature a unique brand.

What does all of this mean for marketers? As a practical matter, you should continue to hone your AI strategy. It’s time to go deeper than just having content. How does your content show up in an AI search, and what do you want users to do once they find it? Should you concentrate on broad content that helps others learn, actionable solutions, or both? It’s also important to remember that the number of people searching on a particular platform can shift. Search leader Google is quickly rolling out AI Overviews, but AI Mode may become more of a default option. And ChatGPT could see its search fortunes grow through strong performance or a well-placed agreement with an operating system, browser or device.

Regardless of how people find content online, once it’s out there, it can serve as content for everyone in the world—part of a global content strategy. There are many nuances between a winning global strategy and a successful local one. Nataly Kelly, CMO at market research platform Zappi, recently co-authored a book about it with Katherine Melchior Ray titled Brand Global, Adapt Local: How to Build Brand Value Across Cultures. I talked to Kelly about the two strategies. An excerpt from our conversation is later in this newsletter.

BIG DEALS

Photo illustration by Cheng Xin/Getty Images

The long-pending $8.4 billion Paramount-Skydance merger was approved by the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday following several actions that suggested the new combined company would further the interests of President Donald Trump. Right before the merger went through, Skydance Media said in FCC filings that it would conduct a comprehensive review of Paramount-owned CBS News, which would include adding an ombudsman to evaluate “any complaints of bias.” Skydance also announced it would end any diversity, equity and inclusion programs—including removing goals to hire a certain number of women and minorities. The company said new management for Paramount would guarantee news and entertainment embody “a diversity of viewpoints across the political and ideological spectrum, consistent with the varying perspectives of the viewing audience.”

In recent weeks, Paramount has taken other steps that Trump praised, purportedly in the name of getting the FCC’s approval for the merger. The company paid $16 million to settle a lawsuit the president filed against CBS News, which claimed that the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris improved the way she sounded. Days after the settlement, which The Late Show host Stephen Colbert called “a big fat bribe,” Paramount announced it was cancelling the long-running show next May. While Paramount said the decision was purely financial, critics speculated it was because Colbert is a frequent Trump critic.

In remarks to CNBC, Trump-appointed FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said the deal shows that “President Trump is fundamentally reshaping the media landscape,” writes Forbes senior contributor Andy Meek. Journalists and critics agree, especially because it appears that some of CBS’s independence might be erased in the merger. However, the deal also includes Comedy Central, which features news and political commentary program The Daily Show. Also on Comedy Central is South Park, which skewered Trump and the Paramount-Skydance deal in its season premiere last week, the first episode in a five-year deal that made the show’s creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone billionaires, writes Forbes’ Matt Craig.

The merger, scheduled to be finalized next week, will put movie producer David Ellison on top of the mega media company. Ellison’s father is centi-billionaire and Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, who controls the majority of voting and equity shares in the holding company acquiring the majority stake in Paramount, writes Forbes’ Phoebe Liu.

IN THE NEWS

LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault gives a speech in April. THIBAUD MORITZ/AFP via Getty Images

Luxury brands have seen sales slowing across the board for the last year, so it’s not especially surprising that conglomerate LVMH reported a decline in sales for the first half of 2025. Forbes contributor Mari Sato writes that analysts expected LVMH’s first-half sales growth to drop more steeply—it was down only 3%, as opposed to a projected 7%.

However, the overall sales decline was driven by the fashion and leather goods segment, which generated about half of LVMH revenues last year, writes Forbes senior contributor Pamela Danziger. Danziger writes that the luxury conglomerate is likely to press forward with new innovations and an increasing focus on quality. Christian Dior and Loewe recently added new fashion directors, who might be able to pull up sales once they become more influential in the brand collections, while Louis Vuitton has the opportunity to improve quality at lower price levels. Dannziger writes that LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault told the Wall Street Journal that adversity tends to be a catalyst for luxury innovation: “In periods when the economic climate is more difficult, when the market slows down, which is the case today, we tend to come out stronger.”

SOCIAL MEDIA

FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP via Getty Images

As new regulations aimed at stopping foreign interference in elections are set to go into effect in the EU, Facebook and Instagram parent Meta has decided to stop serving political, electoral and social advertising on its platforms there, writes Forbes senior contributor Emma Woollacott. Meta said the decision “won’t prevent people in the EU from continuing to debate politics on our services, or stop politicians, candidates and political office holders from producing and sharing political content organically. They just won’t be able to amplify this through paid advertising.”

The new regulation goes into effect in October, and deals with transparency and targeting of political advertising around elections and EU or member state legislation. Under the new law, political ads require a transparency notice, and targeted ads are only allowed if an individual user has given explicit consent.

Last year, Google decided it would also opt out of political ads in the EU because of the new law. The company said the law defines political advertising too broadly, and that there’s no reliable election data that can accurately identify all of the ads and campaigns that may be subject to the law.

ON MESSAGE

Why There’s No Such Thing As Just One Marketing Strategy

Zappi CMO Nataly Kelly and the cover of her new book. Zappi

Today, many products and brands are expanding to global consumers, and marketers should take note of the competitive landscape and consumers in each market. Market research platform Zappi CMO Nataly Kelly recently published Brand Global, Adapt Local: How to Build Brand Value Across Cultures with storied marketer and UC Berkeley lecturer Katherine Melchior Ray, which analyses this issue. I talked to Kelly about what CMOs need to know. This conversation has been edited for length, clarity and continuity.

How are cultural touch points and localization strategies important?

Kelly: It’s really important to have the ability to adapt—the freedom within the frame. But then knowing how exactly you adapt is about getting close to your end customer in each market. A lot of brands rely on local agencies or team members to channel what the customer wants, because every market is slightly different: ‘Customers in this market really like this flavour, or this colour, or we’re not going to launch that campaign on that day because that’s a bad luck day in this market.’

It’s down to the detail of what do customers really value in that market? What’s our competitive situation in that market? And also, what is our goal in that market? Your goal is not always the same in every market. Even though ultimately our goal as marketers is to help drive sales and revenue for products, it might be slightly different in each country because it might be: This product is doing well, but this one isn’t, and we need to increase sales of that specific product, whereas in another country that might be your flagship. The local strategy has to tie to the local business goal and how it rolls up to the global strategy.

It gets very complex inside companies when they are trying to determine how to map the global strategy to the local ones. That’s where communication breakdowns often happen. But staying close to the customer is the ultimate best practice.

Asking the customer directly is the No. 1 best way to get feedback. I happen to be a little biased here because I work for a consumer insights firm, and that’s what we do. We help our customers in many markets capture feedback and data directly from consumers all the time. The No. 1 way to succeed in any market, whether it’s local or global, is to be customer led, customer driven, and really at the heart of where your customers are.

Companies have had to manage the dynamic between global and local strategies for decades, but now we’ve got social media, creators and everything immediately being everywhere. How has that changed what marketers need to do?

I talk a lot with my own team customers about marrying offline and online. As we are digitizing, online is becoming more important, whether it’s mobile apps, social media, or influence. Where you are commercializing your product, and where are you engaging with customers. The number of spaces has dramatically increased. It’s multiplying like gremlins. The more of those we have, the more complex it gets for marketers.

When you’re online, you’re global first. When you’re offline, you’re local first because your physical presence on the ground matters more. But when you’re online, you have to think about global reach no matter what.

In my view, online requires global for strategies and offline requires local for strategies. But it’s not that they don’t also require each other at every touch point, because you are going to want to capitalize on local reach with TikTok, Instagram or whatever social channel you’re using. Those influencers have a local, targeted, curated following.

This marriage of online and offline—and local and global—is becoming very interesting and harder than ever for marketers to parse. It all comes down to segmentation, and knowing, ‘Okay, I’m using this influencer for this strategy. I know she’s very popular in the U.S. market, and I know that she’s got millions of followers.’

What a lot of marketers might not do is get the breakdown. What percentage of your followers are in the U.S.? What percentage are in Europe? What countries in Europe? What languages do they speak? What’s the engagement rate by market, by country? And you can determine: Is this a global play, or is it a U.S./U.K. play? Is it English-speaking markets only, or does this person speak Spanish, too? If so, maybe it’s the U.S. Latino market and Latin America because she’s got reach in multiple countries and languages.

There’s almost no such thing as one country and one language anymore, because the second you’re online, you reach a global audience. I often say it’s like throwing a rock in a pond: Are you going to throw it in a big pond, or are you going to throw it in a small pond? Are you going to throw a bunch of pebbles, or are you going to throw one big rock? It’s really about what kind of reach do we want? What kind of penetration do we want, and how are we going to make that happen?

What do marketers not know about global strategies, local strategies and how to make them work?

There are two things. The first is how different they need to be by market, as we all come with our own assumptions about our home market that we live in. People always assume that there’s more in common than there is, and they assume that things will work similarly when they might not. The No. 1 reason that they don’t work similarly is time in market. You almost always start in one market at a time. What ends up happening is the next market you go into, you’re at a different place in terms of penetrating that market.

You may be the No. 1 brand in your category in the U.S. market. People assume, ‘I’ll just take this exact campaign in the U.S. and put it in the Canadian market because it’s a smaller market and speaks the same language.’ Actually, there’s more than one language in Canada, and there might be very different buying behaviours there, and there’s different competitors there.

The second one is what I would call proximity bias. We are constantly seeing, hearing, watching the news, driving by advertising, walking on the street, and we forget that they’re part of our collective knowledge about our own country and local market. We just assume everybody else knows those things, and it’s underneath the waterline.

In the book, we have this concept of the iceberg of culture. On the top is the basics of culture: We speak different languages. We are in different parts of the world. It’s a different economy. But when you go underneath it, there’s all these other things, like: Who are the competitors in this market? What are the representations of gender in this market? How do people purchase things? What’s the right price point? Do they expect a freebie gift with purchase in this market versus another? I hear this all the time from friends who go to Korea or Japan: ‘I got two bags of free things and I only bought one product,’ whereas in the U.S., they’re very stingy about that.

COMINGS + GOINGS

• Workforce solutions firm ManpowerGroup tapped Valerie Beaulieu-James to be its first chief growth officer, effective August 1. ​​Beaulieu-James joins the company after more than two decades at Microsoft in senior leadership roles, including chief marketing officer for Microsoft U.S.
• Precision component manufacturer NN, Inc. appointed Timothy Erro as its new vice president and chief commercial officer, effective July 22. Erro most recently worked as vice president of global sales and new business development for Commercial Vehicle Group, Inc.
• Enterprise software provider Appfire announced that Catherine Solazzo would be its chief marketing officer. Solazzo steps into the role after working in leadership for Syntax, Tech Data/TD SYNNEX, and IBM.

STRATEGIES + ADVICE

Social media is ablaze with controversy around American Eagle’s new jeans ads featuring actor Sydney Sweeney, with some saying the ads sound like they were written by a white supremacist, while others claim the controversy is proof people are “too woke.” Here are five lessons from the controversy to inform future marketing campaigns.

Professional wrestling icon Hulk Hogan died last week. His life and persona was a master class in branding. Here are some lessons you can learn from his decades of fame.

QUIZ

Nostalgia reigns supreme in the entertainment world. Which of these popular cartoons appealing to adults from decades past is returning with new episodes?

A. King Of The Hill

B. Daria

C. The Ren & Stimpy Show

D. Rocko’s Modern Life

See if you got it right here.

Feature image credit: Cheng Xin/Getty Images

By Megan Poinski

Sourced from Forbes

By Adam Hales

OpenAI’s ChatGPT dominates the competition in weekly active users ahead of the release of ChatGPT-5

Whether you like AI or not, 2025 really feels like the year it’s gone mainstream. Chatbots are becoming integral to work, study, and daily life for hundreds of millions of people.

It’s reached the point where people I’d never have expected to use AI now casually say, “I’ll just ChatGPT it,” replacing the once-default, “I’ll Google it.” Some even use AI assistants for emotional support, with ChatGPT leading the charge, with criticisms of how overly friendly and sycophantic its GPT-4o model can feel.

Beyond personal use, these tools are now embedded in business and government. What we’re seeing is no longer just technological innovation, but a race to see which AI assistant can scale the fastest, integrate the deepest, and stay ahead of the curve.

ChatGPT’s is dominating the space with no signs of slowing down

ChatGPT is on track to hit 700 million weekly active users in August 2025, up from 500 million in March, marking a 4x year-over-year increase.

On average, users spend 16 minutes a day on the app, with an estimated 2.5 to 3 billion prompts sent daily.

Even more impressive, ChatGPT now drives around 60% of all AI-related web traffic, a clear sign of its dominance in the space.

All of this comes as OpenAI is preparing to release ChatGPT-5, with a possible launch set for Thursday, August 7, 2025.

The release follows recent remarks from Sam Altman, who admitted feeling unsettled by its creation, bluntly asking, “What have we done?”

Claude, Gemini and Grok are gaining ground

Claude’s Anthropic model is estimated to have 300 million monthly active users as of Q1 2025, marking a 70% increase since the same quarter in 2024. It’s gaining ground through enterprise integrations, with partners like Slack and Notion helping to expand its reach.

Its enterprise market share has grown from 18% in 2024 to 29% in 2025, positioning Claude as ChatGPT’s closest competitor in the business-to-business space.

Another tool making noise is Grok, which surged in usage following the release of Grok 3. Daily users jumped by five times, and web traffic soared from 600,000 to 4.5 million visits per day.

While Grok isn’t yet competing with Claude or ChatGPT in scale, it has carved out a solid foothold with 35 to 39 million monthly active users, thanks in large part to its integration with Twitter (X).

Closer to the top, Google’s Gemini has quietly reached massive adoption. It jumped from 350 million monthly active users in March 2025 to 450 million by July 2025, with daily active users rising from 9 million in October 2024 to 35 million over 6 months, marking a 4x increase.

The AI race is far from over and isn’t going anywhere

ChatGPT is leading the race for now, with ChatGPT-5 launching imminently. OpenAI is aiming to expand its lead even further.

Another important thing with these AI models is the context windows, with Claude Sonnet 4 supporting 200K tokens, compared to GPT-4o’s 128K. Even more impressive is Gemini’s 1 million tokens with its 2.5 Pro model. Tokens determine how much information a model can handle at once; this is known as the context window (The larger the tokens, the better).

Despite context windows being an important factor, at this point, it also feels like trust, usability, and speed are becoming just as important as raw model quality. OpenAI itself faced recent backlash after accidentally exposing shared chat logs to Google search indexing, making me feel like security and privacy may soon be what tips users toward other platforms.

AI adoption is accelerating across nearly every sector. Personally, I find open-source models like Meta’s llama or Qwen the most exciting.

Local deployment is still limited by device power for most people, myself included, but the potential of running a powerful model on personal hardware is an appealing prospect and one I’m following very closely.

Feature image credit: Getty Images| SOPA Images

By Adam Hales

Adam is a Psychology Master’s graduate passionate about gaming, community building, and digital engagement. A lifelong Xbox fan since 2001, he started with Halo: Combat Evolved and remains an avid achievement hunter. Over the years, he has engaged with several Discord communities, helping them get established and grow. Gaming has always been more than a hobby for Adam—it’s where he’s met many friends, taken on new challenges, and connected with communities that share his passion.

Sourced from Windows Central

By Jimi Gibson

Marketing can’t buy trust — but showing up in your community can

You bought the franchise or launched your business. You have the signs, staff and systems in place. But there’s one critical element many overlook: visibility where it truly counts — in your own community.

Maybe you’ve noticed your leads have flattened, referrals have dried up and you’re left wondering, “What happened?”

Here’s a surprising truth: Consumers aren’t loyal to brands anymore. They’re loyal to people. In today’s crowded marketplace, the businesses that thrive are the ones with owners who are visible, relatable and genuinely invested in their neighbours’ lives. Not flashy influencers or TikTok famous — just present, authentic and connected.

Humanizing your business requires a mindset shift. Your future customers want to know the real you. What drives you? Why did you start or buy this business in their neighbourhood?

I get it. You’re thinking, “I’m not a marketer, and I have zero time for social media.” But here’s the secret — when you push past the fear of putting yourself out there and start showing up consistently, the results will surprise you. You’ll wonder why you didn’t start sooner.

Don’t overcomplicate it. Let your involvement flow naturally from your passions and life. Share simple weekly tips based on your expertise or sponsor your kid’s local sports team. These small, authentic actions have big ripple effects on referrals and reputation.

Related: How to Better Manage Your Brand’s Reputation in the Digital Age

Visibility isn’t vanity — it’s vital

This isn’t about becoming a social media star. It’s about stepping out from behind your brand and showing up as yourself — in your neighbourhood, your industry and in the lives of your customers.

When people think of the services you offer, they should think of you by name — not because you spent a fortune on ads, but because you’re a familiar, trusted presence where it matters most.

Show up where your community already gathers:

• Sponsor local sports teams.
• Greet homeowners personally when you arrive on site.
• Attend ribbon cuttings, block parties and community events.

This isn’t “networking.” It’s about being known and trusted because you show up consistently.

Pro tip: Hate marketing? Great. Just do good work in your neighbourhood, and let that be your marketing.

Your personal brand keeps you in the game

Your franchise or company name opens doors, but how you show up keeps you there.

If you’re a local service provider, don’t let your team handle the job without you making a personal appearance. Meet your customers at the final inspection. Shake hands. Thank them. Recognize your crew in front of the client. Small gestures of appreciation build lasting loyalty and generate powerful word-of-mouth.

This approach doesn’t need a complicated content calendar — just genuine, consistent connection.

Pro tip: Share stories about your team, community involvement, or customer successes rather than hard sales pitches. When people respect you, you don’t need to sell.

Use storytelling to make your business memorable

People remember stories, not slogans.

Want to stand out? Share why you started your business, how customer feedback changed your approach or lessons learned while serving your neighbourhood. Real stories create emotional connections, build trust and drive referrals.

Ways to share your story:

• A short video about your journey.
• A blog post or LinkedIn article with a valuable lesson.
• A talk at local clubs or service organizations—no sales pitch, just connection.
• Brief posts on social media celebrating milestones.

Pro tip: Keep a running list of meaningful customer experiences to turn into stories when the moment is right.

Stop being invisible — start being known

Flat leads, stalled growth, and dry referral streams aren’t always about the economy or competitors. Sometimes, it’s simply that no one knows who’s behind the business.

Here’s the fix: Get involved locally. Join service clubs, attend chamber events, support neighborhood charities and festivals. Meet other business owners, refer them and let them refer you.

When people know you, they trust you. That trust multiplies, and your reputation grows exponentially. Get your whole team involved — each person becomes an ambassador who extends your reach.

Pro tip: Don’t treat every interaction as a sales opportunity. Just be someone people want to support.

Get out there and show up

Marketing requires time and money, but so does community engagement — and one feels authentic, the other doesn’t.

Stop hiding behind your brand. Invest in your neighbours’ lives. Stop chasing attention and start earning it.

You don’t need to be a social media rock star. You just need to be present and known in your corner of the world.

By Jimi Gibson

Sourced from Entrepreneur

By Maha Abouelenein

Your LinkedIn profile is your digital storefront not just a job board.

Are you going to LinkedIn to find a job or build your brand? Well if you focus on building your brand – you will get more than just job opportunities knocking on your door.

Think of LinkedIn as your digital storefront. It’s the first impression you make when you’re not in the room and it’s often the difference between getting noticed or getting overlooked.

Whether you’re job hunting, building your personal brand, growing your network, or just showing up more intentionally in your industry, your profile can be your most powerful tool, if you use it well.

The 5 LinkedIn Basics Everyone Should Have For a Compelling Profile.

1. Lead With A Clear Headline: Your headline should reflect more than just your job title. Use it to communicate your value and expertise. Don’t be afraid to state your mission or the problem you solve.
2. Write A Compelling About Section: This is your story, make it personal and make it clear. Who are you? What do you do? What are you passionate about? What kind of opportunities are you looking for? This is your chance to show, not just tell, what do you uniquely bring to the table?
3. Use A Professional Photo and Banner: People connect with people. A high-quality, approachable photo matters. Take it one step further: use your banner image to visually showcase your brand, business, or impact. (Your book cover, tagline, awards, podcast, media features, etc.)
4. Show, Don’t Just Tell: Use the Featured section to add media, links, or articles that demonstrate your expertise. Post consistently about what you know and how you help others. That’s how you build trust.
5. Grow Your Network Intentionally: Your network is your net worth. Add value through thoughtful comments, meaningful DMs, and engaging with other peoples content. Don’t just wait until you need something, build before you need it.

To build a credible and engaging LinkedIn profile, consistency is key. Aim to post at least 5 to 7 times per week, using a mix of formats such as:

• Text-only posts where you share thought leadership, industry insights, personal experiences, advice, or even simple productivity hacks.
• Story-driven content that reveals real behind-the-scenes moments, early challenges, or personal milestones. Transformation stories in particular tend to resonate deeply, especially when paired with a compelling image that enhances the emotional impact.

To make your profile truly stand out, consider developing a signature post format—a repeatable and recognizable style that builds familiarity and trust with your audience. These posts create consistent engagement patterns, foster anticipation, reduce content fatigue, and make content creation more efficient.

If you’re wondering, “What should I post?”, don’t worry. Spend just 30 minutes creating your content pillars, 4 to 5 core themes that serve as your go-to categories for content ideas.

Questions to define your content pillars:

1. What topics matter most to my audience?
2. What are their most common questions or pain points?
3. What kind of content are they sharing most often?
4. What inspires or motivates them?

For example, If you’re a real estate agent, your content pillars might include:

• Educational content – to inform and empower your audience.
• Inspirational content – to motivate and build connection.
• Lifestyle & community highlights – to showcase local flavour and relatability.
• Promotional content – to drive engagement with your services

By aligning your content with these pillars, you’ll always have a strong foundation to draw from, making your LinkedIn presence both strategic and sustainable.

LinkedIn’s Impact on Your Personal Brand

People do business with people they trust, your digital presence can build that trust before the conversation even starts.

LinkedIn is your most powerful platform for shaping your personal brand. With over one billion members globally, it offers unmatched access to decision-makers, industry peers, and potential collaborators. What you post, how you engage, and the way you present your expertise directly influence how others perceive your credibility and value. Whether you’re sharing insights, showcasing your work, or engaging in thought leadership, every interaction contributes to your digital reputation. In today’s professional landscape, where visibility is tied to opportunity, LinkedIn is the stage where your story gets told, so make it count.

Questions to define your content pillars:

1. What topics matter most to my audience?
2. What are their most common questions or pain points?
3. What kind of content are they sharing most often?
4. What inspires or motivates them?

For example, If you’re a real estate agent, your content pillars might include:

• Educational content – to inform and empower your audience.
• Inspirational content – to motivate and build connection.
• Lifestyle & community highlights – to showcase local flavour and relatability.
• Promotional content – to drive engagement with your services

By aligning your content with these pillars, you’ll always have a strong foundation to draw from, making your LinkedIn presence both strategic and sustainable.

LinkedIn’s Impact on Your Personal Brand

People do business with people they trust, your digital presence can build that trust before the conversation even starts.

LinkedIn is your most powerful platform for shaping your personal brand. With over one billion members globally, it offers unmatched access to decision-makers, industry peers, and potential collaborators. What you post, how you engage, and the way you present your expertise directly influence how others perceive your credibility and value. Whether you’re sharing insights, showcasing your work, or engaging in thought leadership, every interaction contributes to your digital reputation. In today’s professional landscape, where visibility is tied to opportunity, LinkedIn is the stage where your story gets told, so make it count.

Feature Image Credit: NurPhoto via Getty Images

By Maha Abouelenein

Sourced from Forbes

By Tilman Harmeling

What does a privacy-first approach to data collection actually look like?

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

Personalized content is now a fact of life – what was once considered innovative is now standard for online marketing. As anybody who has indulged in a bit of online retail therapy can tell you, websites are now surprisingly accurate in what they recommend, with promotions appearing at just the right time and content adapting as if by magic.

Whilst that’s the super power of personalization, it’s also a bit… disconcerting? As convenient as it might be to see exactly the right product at exactly the right time, this also raises a lot of questions: where does all of this information actually come from? Exactly how much does this company know about me? Did I really consent to sharing all of this data?

These questions are only becoming more frequent as consumers become more aware of the value of their data. A recent Deloitte study showed over two-thirds of smartphone users worry about data security and privacy on their devices, whilst in the US 86% of consumers are more worried about their data privacy than the state of the economy.

These are sobering statistics and beg the question: if consumers are crying out for better data protection, how can businesses enact a privacy-first approach to data-driven personalization?

Thinking strategically about personalization

The first important part of making personalization fit for our privacy-conscious age is ensuring that it’s done with purpose. Thinking strategically about personalization, as opposed to just considering the technical aspects of it, is crucial to building a model which is both useful to a business and respects data privacy demands from consumers.

Personalizing without a clear goal risks losing consumer trust: just because a business can collect a certain piece of data or display content to a specific target group, it doesn’t mean they should. Over-personalization or irrelevant suggestions can cause rejection – especially when it’s unclear where the information comes from, so it is always better to personalize with purpose.

This also applies to the data that businesses collect. Even with consent, users today expect to decide what information they share. The starting point shouldn’t be a tracking script, but a deliberate content strategy: Which data is truly necessary? What do we want to achieve with it? And how can we explain it clearly and understandably?

Doing this properly brings two benefits: the data is legally secure and often significantly better in quality. Transparency also builds trust – which is more important than ever in digital marketing. Instead of asking for a full set of personalization data upfront, businesses should consider asking for smaller data points like a postcode to show local offers. This approach creates value for both sides and, crucially, builds consumer trust.

Segments rather than individuals

Advances in technology now mean that personalization can be really granular – but is that always desirable? In a privacy-conscious world, definitely not.

Not every user wants to be individually addressed, and not every website needs to do so. Often, it’s more effective to tailor content for groups with similar interests, behaviour, or needs. Common segments include first-time visitors vs. return users, mobile vs. desktop users, regional audiences, or browsers who never add items to their cart.

Targeting these groups allows for impactful content variation – without the complexity of individual personalization. Privacy preferences can also be respected: cautious users are addressed neutrally, while opt-in users get a more personal experience.

Flexibility is key

Many companies struggle to reconcile data protection and personalization – often because they see them as contradictory. But the opposite is true: taking data protection seriously builds trust and allows for better personalization.

Take consent banners as an example: one which clearly differentiates data types and allows easy management of preferences is more transparent and, so consistent data shows, reduces bounce rates.

The key is to recognize that flexibility on what consumers expect is king. Personalization is not a one-time project and, just as regulation is continuously evolving, so are user expectations. Successful privacy-first personalization means regularly reviewing and adapting content, processes, and technology.

The bottom line is that personalization is not an end in itself. Rather, it’s meant to help deliver the right content to the right audience at the right time – without crossing lines. Focusing on what users truly need and are willing to share often leads to better results than collecting as much data as possible.

A privacy-first approach to personalization isn’t an oxymoron, it’s a necessity in the modern world. Personalization shouldn’t just be a technical concept, but one that places consumers at the heart of what a business does and offers – not just relevant content, but a brand built on clarity, consistency and respect for consumer attitudes towards privacy.

Feature image credit: Shutterstock

By Tilman Harmeling

Senior Privacy Expert at Usercentrics.

Sourced from techradar.pro

By Jodie Cook,

Think of your LinkedIn profile as a pitch for your business. What’s it telling your potential clients? Every time one lands on it, you’ve got a few seconds to prove you’re worth their time before they go and find someone who actually gets it. Don’t leave this to chance. You decide whether you land the meeting or lose the prospect forever.

If you don’t know what you’re doing on LinkedIn, you could cause problems for your personal brand. You are overlooked for opportunities, you waste money on other marketing channels, and you give off the wrong signals that undermine your work.

Your LinkedIn is not a digital resume. It’s more than that. If you simply upload your work history and add a passable headshot, high-value relationships will never materialize. Fix these five credibility killers and watch how fast the right people start paying attention.

Your LinkedIn profile needs to work harder than you do: here’s how

Generic headlines waste prime real estate

Your headline appears in eight places on LinkedIn. In search results, comment sections, connection requests, and message previews. Yet most people squander this visibility on meaningless job titles. “Marketing manager | Digital strategist | MBA” tells me nothing about the problems you solve or the value you create. You’re undermining yourself by being generic, showing clients you don’t really get it. Stop using the most valuable real estate on your profile to blend in.

Write a headline that makes your ideal client stop scrolling. Name exactly who you help and what transformation you deliver. “I help SaaS founders double revenue without doubling their team” beats “Business consultant” every time. Get specific about your superpower. The right people need to recognize themselves in your headline within two seconds.

Profile photos from your cousin’s wedding

Amateur hour arrives when your profile picture looks grabbed from last weekend’s barbecue. You can still see someone else’s shoulder in the frame. Professional credibility tanks when you show up looking unprepared. You wouldn’t arrive at a client meeting in a wrinkled t-shirt. Why let that be their first impression online?

Invest in a proper headshot that positions you as the expert you claim to be. Wear what you’d wear to close a six-figure deal. Look directly at the camera like you’re making eye contact with your next client. Profiles with professional photos get 21 times more views and 36 times more messages. Your photo either opens doors or keeps them locked. Choose accordingly.

About sections written by robots

Third-person bios make you sound like you hired your assistant to write about you. “John is a results-driven professional with 15 years of experience” creates instant distance between you and the reader. Nobody talks about themselves like that in conversation. Your about section should feel like the start of a meaningful dialogue, not a Wikipedia entry.

Write directly to one person, and open with their biggest challenge. Follow immediately with proof you can solve it. Share specific client wins using numbers they care about. Break up text walls with single-line punchy paragraphs. End with exactly what they should do next. If someone can’t understand how you’ll change their business within 30 seconds of reading, you’ve already lost them.

Experience sections that list duties

If your LinkedIn experience section reads like a job description instead of a victory lap, something has to change. “Responsible for managing social media accounts” means nothing, and it undersells the work you actually did. “Grew Instagram following from 5k to 50k in 6 months, generating $2million in attributed revenue” tells a story that grabs attention. Every position should showcase what you achieved. Don’t make readers have to fill in the gaps.

Transform your work history into a results showcase. Lead with the outcome, then explain how you created it. Include specific metrics, percentages, and dollar amounts. Show the scale of businesses you’ve impacted. Say you “increased sales by 67% in Q4 2023 by implementing a LinkedIn outreach strategy that generated 143 qualified leads.” Make your track record impossible to ignore. Make this section do you justice.

Dead recommendations and empty skills

Recommendations from 2018 might as well be ancient history. Outdated endorsements signal you peaked years ago and haven’t done anything worth talking about since. But we both know that’s not true. Skills sections filled with buzzwords like “leadership” and “communication” waste space that could showcase your actual expertise. Your profile should radiate with current energy based on what you actually do today.

You are awesome, so get up to date. Request fresh recommendations from clients you’ve helped transform in the last six months. Guide them to share specific results and transformations. Replace generic skills with niche expertise that sets you apart. “B2B LinkedIn lead-generation” beats “marketing.” Feature case studies, client wins, and recent content that proves you’re actively creating value right now. LinkedIn profiles should be living documents, not time capsules.

Your LinkedIn reputation builds one profile section at a time

Professional credibility evaporates when LinkedIn headlines overflow with meaningless buzzwords instead of clear value propositions, instantly signalling surface-level thinking to potential connections. Wedding photos cropped for profile pictures display a fundamental misunderstanding of professional standards, while third-person about sections create distance instead of connection. Outdated recommendations suggest professional stagnation, especially when paired with generic banner images that match countless other profiles. Oversights compound into a mediocre profile. And that’s not you. Fix your LinkedIn profile and watch how quickly the right opportunities find you.

Feature image credit: Getty

By Jodie Cook

Find Jodie Cook on LinkedIn. Visit Jodie’s website.

Sourced from Forbes

By Tamilore Oladipo

Instagram isn’t just a photo-sharing app anymore. In 2025, it’s a digital town square — part search engine, part shopping mall, part entertainment hub, all rolled into one ✨aesthetic✨  platform.

It’s where creators build brands, where brands tap into culture, and where billions of users scroll every day.

We’ve pulled together the most important Instagram statistics for 2025 — blending industry-wide research with real insights from Buffer’s tools and data — so you can make informed decisions about your Instagram strategy this year.

Whether you’re there to build reach, drive revenue, or just stay visible in the scroll, these numbers will help you understand what’s happening on Instagram and why it matters.

Let’s dive in.

Instagram by the numbers: How big is the platform?

Before diving into strategy, let’s start with the size and shape of Instagram in 2025 — who’s on it, where they are, and how fast the platform is still growing. Because even if Instagram isn’t the newest app on the block, it’s still one of the biggest — and one of the most deeply embedded in how we share, discover, and connect online.

Instagram has over 2 billion monthly active users — and counting

Instagram hit 2 billion monthly active users — and it happened in just over 11 years, reaching the number faster than Facebook and YouTube. With that many eyes on the content of brands and creators, there’s more than enough opportunity to grow on the platform.

India, the U.S., and Brazil top the charts — but other countries are climbing fast

The countries with the largest Instagram user bases are:

• India: 414 million
• United States: 172 million
• Brazil: 141 million
• Indonesia: 103 million
• Turkey: 58 million
• Japan: 57 million

But size isn’t the only story. When it comes to uptake — the percentage of a country’s population that uses Instagram — you’ll find small nations like Kazakhstan (89.3%) ahead of the pack.

Turkey also has a high Instagram audience uptake rate (88.8%) of the population using the social network. In Uruguay, the United Arab Emirates, and Brazil, the photo-sharing platform is used by more than 86% of each country’s population.

This information is handy for marketers running international campaigns. A country might not have that many users, but higher uptake might offer stronger community engagement than a massive user base that’s more passive.

Southern Asia holds the largest regional share of Instagram users

Broken down by region, Southern Asia now accounts for over a quarter of all Instagram users worldwide, with India as the clear heavyweight. The full picture:

• Southern Asia: 448 million users
• South-Eastern Asia: 177 million
• Northern America: 192 million
• Southern America: 237 million
• Western Europe: 78 million
• Western Asia: 133 million
• Eastern Asia: 101 million
• Africa (all regions combined): ~91 million

If your audience spans more than one country or continent, these stats are a reminder to think regionally — not just nationally — when planning your Instagram strategy.

84% of social users have an Instagram profile

Instagram doesn’t just dominate by user count — it’s also the most widely adopted platform among global internet users with a social media presence. According to recent reports, 84% of social media users have an Instagram account. That’s more than TikTok, YouTube, or even X (formerly Twitter).

While this stat doesn’t tell you how often people post or engage, it confirms one thing: Instagram is still the default social identity for most people online.

Instagram connections in Buffer have nearly doubled since 2022

Among the 11 social networks our users can connect to Buffer, Instagram has grown 94.7% since 2022, climbing from 657,000 to 1.28 million total channel connections, with 104,000 of those accounts actively publishing through Buffer today.

This internal spike confirms Instagram’s staying power for creators and small businesses alike.

Who’s on Instagram: Demographics in 2025

Knowing how many people use Instagram is one thing — but understanding who they are is what actually drives smart content decisions. In 2025, Instagram’s audience skews young, global, and increasingly balanced across gender. But there’s nuance in the numbers — and opportunity in the margins.

The average Instagram user is aged 25–34

The data puts the average user in the 25–34 age bracket, a sweet spot for both creator and consumer content. This age group makes up the largest share of global users, followed closely by 18–24 year-olds.

But don’t mistake that for a Gen Z monopoly. There’s a solid presence of users in their 30s, 40s, and even 50s — especially in Western countries, where the platform has matured alongside its user base.

So if you’re only creating content for Gen Z, you may be overlooking a high-intent, high-spending segment just outside that range.

Users aged 18–34 account for over 60% of Instagram’s global audience

Here’s the age breakdown across key groups:

• 18–24: 31.7%
• 25–34: 30.6%
• 35–44: 16%
• 45–54: 8.7%
• 55–64: 4.6%
• 65+: 2.9%

This split shows that while Gen Z and Millennials are still the dominant force, 1 in 3 users are older than 35. That opens the door for more lifestyle, family, finance, and career content that speaks to an aging-but-active cohort.

Additionally, Meta reports that male users aged 25–34 make up the largest single segment on the platform.

The gender split is nearly even — and still shifting

Globally, Instagram’s gender distribution in 2025 is 52.5% male and 46.5% female — a near balance. In some regions, like the U.S., women actually edge ahead in usage. And while Meta’s data still reports only binary gender categories, the trend is clear: Instagram is no longer skewed to one side.

This means you’re not speaking to just one demographic. Your content should reflect a mix of perspectives (or at least not assume a default voice).

Demographic makeup varies widely by country

In India, the platform skews towards male, younger audiences. In the U.S., it leans female with more representation across the 25–44 age range. Emerging markets like Indonesia and Nigeria show rising Gen Z adoption, while Western Europe sees stronger retention in older brackets.

“Instagram users” is not a monolith. If you’re marketing globally (or even regionally), it pays to check the local data, not just the global averages.

How people use Instagram in 2025

Instagram isn’t just a place to post — it’s a place to explore, connect, message, shop, and scroll for hours. While the platform might look like one big feed, it’s really a network of micro-behaviours.

Understanding how people actually use Instagram in 2025 helps you create content that meets them where they are — and how they like to engage.

People spend 12 hours/month on Instagram

Most Instagram users spend an average of 33 minutes per day on the platform. That’s less than TikTok (53 minutes), but ahead of platforms like Snapchat and Facebook.

What this tells us: Instagram hits a sweet spot. It’s more “scrollable” than LinkedIn or Pinterest, but still feels intentional — a platform where people come to consume, but also to create, comment, and connect.

91% of Gen Z have a profile — but they’re not the only ones posting

Instagram remains Gen Z’s go-to social platform, with 91% of Gen Z users maintaining a profile. But they’re not the only ones engaging. Over 32% of the platform’s global audience is aged 35 and up, and many of them are actively gathering Instagram followers, not just lurking.

If you’re creating content that only targets one generation, you might be missing the full opportunity.

Create in formats Gen Z favours (reels, stories), but use messaging that resonates across age groups — like education, value, or personal storytelling.

Instagram users also use other platforms

Only 0.2% of Instagram users use it as their only social platform. The rest are active elsewhere:

• 80.3% also use Facebook
• 76.9% also use YouTube
• 54.3% also use TikTok

This makes Instagram a perfect place to reinforce — not repeat — your brand or creator message. Think cross-posting but specific to each platform: behind-the-scenes from a YouTube upload, shorter takes from a long LinkedIn post, or expanded ideas from a trending Reel.

Those overlaps echo our data: creators aren’t replacing Instagram — they’re layering it into an ecosystem of text-first apps, short-form video feeds, and carousel-friendly networks. Repurposing isn’t optional anymore; it’s how modern audiences actually consume.

Users are spending less time on static content — and more on video

While users still post more single images than any other format, the time they spend engaging has shifted. Meta reports that reels now account for over 50% of time spent on Instagram.

View on Threads

This means that video is no longer optional. Luckily, it doesn’t have to be high-production. Reels, stories, and behind-the-scenes moments all drive time-on-platform. And if video just isn’t your thing, don’t worry — by adding music to carousel posts, your content will still show up in the reels and suggested content feeds.

Engagement is shifting to Instagram direct messages

In our report on average engagement rate across different social platforms, we found that in January 2024, Instagram’s median engagement rate was 2.94%. By January 2025, it had adjusted to 0.61%.

This change reflects a broader shift in how users engage with content rather than a loss of platform relevance.

But the average engagement rate on Instagram isn’t disappearing — it’s moving behind the scenes. You need to create content that people want to interact with publicly and share privately. Think saveable, shareable, or response-driven.

For creators and brands alike, direct messages have become a go-to place for audience questions, customer support, feedback loops, and even sales conversions.

Meta has emphasized the “growing importance of private messaging” across all their platforms. They noted a shift in user behaviour from feed engagement to “meaningful private interactions”, leaning in with features like Instagram Broadcast Channels, DM automation tools, and shopping integrations directly inside chats.

So if your only call-to-action is “comment below,” you might be missing half the conversation. Treat your inbox like a micro-community — set up a broadcast channel, use DM automation tools, and engage your audience directly.

How content performs on Instagram

You’ve got the audience. You’ve got the strategy. But if you don’t know how each format actually performs, you’re guessing in the dark. In 2025, content on Instagram behaves differently depending on format, the size of your account, and how users engage across feeds. The following Instagram statistics break down what’s working — and what isn’t — so you can create with purpose.

Reels still dominate reach, especially for small accounts

In our analysis of over 4 million Instagram posts, we confirmed what many creators already know: Reels consistently outperform all other formats for reach.

• Reels get 36% more reach than carousels
• 125% more reach than single-image posts

The Instagram Reels feed itself is built for discoverability — meaning even small accounts can go viral

Reels are still your best bet if your goal is visibility. Use them to grow your audience, test ideas, and introduce new content series. And try out features like trial reels or adopt new hashtags to reach new eyes.

And Buffer’s connection growth for TikToks, shorts, and reels all point the same way — audiences are primed for quick, vertical video no matter where they scroll. That appetite is exactly what keeps Reels at the top for reach on Instagram.

Carousels drive the most engagement — by a clear margin

When it comes to likes, comments, and shares, carousels win. They receive:

• 12% more engagement than Reels
• 114% more engagement than static images
• The highest save rate across all post types

The reason for this is pretty clear: Carousels keep people swiping, and the Instagram algorithm loves content that keeps people on the platform. Carousels are also perfect for educational content, story-driven visuals, or value-packed slides that people want to revisit later.

Use carousels to go deep on a topic. Think checklists, breakdowns, before-and-afters, or multi-step guides.

Content performance shifts by account size

What works for an account with 5,000 followers won’t always work for one with 500,000. Here’s how performance scales on Instagram, according to Socialinsider:

• Smaller accounts (under 10k) see higher reels view rates (up to 20%) and stronger story reach
• Mid-sized accounts (50k–200k) benefit from balanced strategies — reels for reach, carousels for community
• Large accounts (100k+) see better comment and save rates on static images and carousels — likely due to loyal audience behaviour

The lesson here is to tailor your content format to your growth stage. Small accounts should create content that gets them discovered. And the bigger you get, the more the content should resonate to keep existing followers engaged.

The best time to post on Instagram is between 3 and 6 p.m. on weekdays

After analysing more than 2 million Instagram posts, we found that the best time to post on Instagram is generally 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. on weekdays.

The best day to post on Instagram is Friday

Our research also found that Friday is the best day to post on Instagram, closely followed by Monday. But overall, you can’t go wrong posting on a weekday.

Brands and creators on Instagram

Instagram has long been the go-to platform for visual storytelling, and in 2025, creators and brands are doubling down. But what’s changing isn’t whether they show up — it’s how. From nano-influencer dominance to format strategies that actually drive results, this section unpacks what’s working right now for the people using Instagram to grow a business, build trust, and create community.

Nano-influencers make up 77% of all creators on Instagram

According to Statista, nano-influencers (1k–10k followers) account for 75.9% of all influencers on the platform. Micro-influencers (10k–100k) make up another 13.6%, with only a small fraction falling into the macro or celebrity tier (3.5%).

You don’t need a massive following to have impact. For brands, this means there’s a huge pool of niche creators with high engagement across the platform’s audience — ideal for authentic partnerships and lower-cost campaigns.

Smaller accounts get more reach per post

Accounts under 10k followers aren’t just more common — they often outperform larger accounts in key metrics:

• Reels view rate: 20%
• Instagram Stories reach rate: up 35% YoY
• Higher save rates per follower

This is because Instagram’s algorithm favours newer or smaller creators to keep the content feed fresh. Plus, smaller accounts often feel more personal and approachable — a major driver for engagement.

If you’re growing from scratch, lean into reels + Instagram Stories + educational carousels. Don’t wait to “look big” before showing up consistently.

Follower growth is fastest for small and mid-sized accounts

Socialinsider found that the fastest-growing Instagram accounts in 2025 are still in the 1k–50k range:

• 1k–5k: 38% average growth
• 5k–10k: 35%
• 10k–50k: 33.8%

The bigger an Instagram account gets, the harder it is to grow. That doesn’t mean growth stops; it just happens more slowly, and the strategy for growth changes accordingly. That means every stage of growth has a strategy:

• Small accounts → focus on visibility
• Mid-sized accounts → build community
• Large accounts → double down on value and retention

Reminder: Don’t copy a content strategy from an account 100x your size. What works for them may not serve you — yet.

Where the money goes on Instagram

Instagram isn’t just where people scroll — it’s where people spend. In 2025, Instagram remains one of the most commercially active platforms, whether it’s through influencer partnerships, product discovery, or DMs that lead to real sales. These Instagram statistics explores how money moves on the platform — and how smart brands and creators are turning attention into action.

44% of users shop on Instagram weekly

Instagram isn’t just a discovery platform — it’s a storefront. According to Instagram’s own research, 44% of users interact with shoppable content or browse for products at least once per week.

Even without the dedicated “Shop” tab, product discovery happens through:

• Creator and influencer partnerships
• Tagged products in Reels and carousels
• Stories with direct links
• DM-based selling (especially for small businesses)

Even if you’re not “selling on Instagram,” your audience might be ready to buy. Make it easy for them to act.

The smallest Instagram influencer rates start from $100

Instagram influencers across all tiers are highly sought after for good reason. Between the potential eyes on their content with the platform’s 2-billion-strong user base and various features, there are many options for brands across different industries.

There’s a generally accepted Instagram influencer rate of $100 per 10,000 followers, which can change based on the number of posts requested, the influencer’s metrics, the industry in play, the value of an influencer’s audience to a brand, and many other factors.

According to a survey by Impact.com, estimated Instagram rates break down as follows:

• Nano-influencers (500–10,000 followers): $500 to $2000 per post
• Micro-influencers (10,000–50,000 followers): $2000 to $8000 per post
• Mid-tier influencers (50,000–100,000 followers): $8000 to $20,000 per post
• Macro-influencers (100,000–500,000 followers): $20,000 to $45,000 per post
• Mega-influencers (500,000+ followers): $45,000+ per post

Instagram influences more purchases than any other platform (after YouTube)

A 2024 RetailDive study found that Instagram influences more consumer purchasing decisions than TikTok, Facebook, or Pinterest — second only to YouTube.

It’s not always about conversion on-platform. Instagram content often drives:

• Brand awareness
• DM inquiries
• Site traffic
• Wishlist saves or screenshot purchases

The lesson here is that Instagram’s value for generating sales goes beyond that discovery on the platform. It’s often the first place someone finds you — or the last place they get convinced to purchase from you.

What these Instagram statistics mean for your strategy in 2025

In 2025, Instagram still has the range, but standing out means getting specific. With over 2 billion monthly users and several content formats and features competing for attention, growth no longer comes from posting more but from posting strategically.

These Instagram stats show us that:

• Reels still drive the most reach
• Carousels spark the most saves, and
• Smaller accounts often outperform larger ones on core engagement metrics.

But behind those numbers is a deeper shift: audiences are more fragmented, engagement is increasingly private, and success looks different depending on your size, goals, and niche. That’s why the best Instagram strategies right now don’t involve virality or trend-chasing but lean into consistency, building a core audience, and make space for both discovery and depth.

You don’t need to go viral every week. You just need to be memorable, helpful, and worth returning to. Let the numbers guide you and let clarity drive your next post.

By Tamilore Oladipo

Sourced from Buffer

Sourced from Yahoo! finance

Digital Giants Such as Google, Meta, Amazon, and TikTok Reshape Ad Spending as Retail Media, CTV, and DOOH Lead Emerging Trends

Sourced from Yahoo! finance

By John Herrman

Reddit is one of the last thriving islands of the old web. Can it survive AI?

t doesn’t really matter who you are, how you spend your time online, or what you imagine your relationship with the internet to be. However you scroll, wherever you browse, and whatever you want to see on your screens, it has probably happened to you, and if you haven’t noticed yet, you may now: Your world has become more Reddit.

The 20-year-old platform, which began as a niche link aggregator and gradually grew into the web’s default community of communities, has gone from optional to inescapable, its little red alien logo manifesting no matter which way you look. For my zoomer cousin, a professional TikToker who was still learning to read when Reddit was founded, it’s obviously “the only place where you know there are real people.” For 82-year-old user LogyBayer, who grew up programming FORTRAN on punch-card computers in the 1960s, Reddit, where he has posted thousands of times, is the closest thing he can find to “the wondrous world of Usenet,” the online discussion system that predates the web. Many of the less online people I know, who had maybe heard of Reddit, are now tapping through threads about life advice and HVAC repair; at the same time, some of the most online people I know, who for years saw Reddit as a sort of internet playpen, a meme aggregator downstream of more vital communities, are now logging in daily.

It’s happened to me, too, a screen-addled tech reporter who has been covering the platform’s growth — and various problems — for well over a decade with at least notional remove: When it’s time again to pick up that phone and incinerate a few more seconds of my one life on earth, more often than not, I shovel them into Reddit.

This isn’t just a feeling. Reddit, after two decades of gradual and uneven growth, is exploding. According to Similarweb, it’s one of the largest properties online; if you take away social apps like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, and utilities like Google and ChatGPT, its closest competition among websites is Wikipedia. In 2023, according to the company, Reddit had around 60 million unique visitors a day; its latest earnings report puts the number at 108 million a day, 400 million a week, and, according to conservative estimates, well over a billion different people using it every month. About those earnings reports: In 2024, Reddit went public. Its stock price popped, then climbed alongside its traffic. Revenue is way up, and after years of losses, the company eked out a slim profit in the last quarter.

Why now? Reddit’s co-founder and current CEO, Steven Huffman, suggests the answer is obvious. “When we started Reddit, it was a web page of 25 links from around the internet,” he says. “Now, 20 years later, you’re stumbling into some thread where people are telling stories they’ve never told before and it drifts into life advice for someone who lives 2,000 miles away.” He didn’t see that coming, he says, but “in hindsight, it actually makes a lot of sense.”

For years, Reddit, which is made up of thousands of sub-Reddits moderated by volunteers, offered a centralized and streamlined alternative to the web’s thousands of small and scattered forums, message boards, and independent communities. At the same time, in contrast with the much larger social-media platforms that rose around it, it looked niche. “The word social media didn’t exist” when the site was launched, Huffman says. Since then, in his telling, the company has steered away from influencer culture and growth-at-all-costs social-media scaling — “we don’t want people to be famous because of Reddit,” he says — and toward realizing “the vision of the old web.” Another way to tell the story is that the platform largely just stayed put. In any case, as the mega-platforms merge into TikTok-clone sameness, Reddit’s steady focus on giving online randos a place to pseudonymously post with one another is paying off. In Huffman’s view, Reddit’s growth is simply its reward for stubbornly — maybe accidentally — “fulfilling the promise of the internet.”

It’s a good story, and there’s something to it. But just out of frame, there are … a few other relevant things happening online, each as obvious to the typical browser as Reddit’s sudden come-up. The World Wide Web from which Reddit grew, and for which Huffman expresses so much reverence, has been going through something akin to ecological collapse after being poisoned, then abandoned, by advertisers that have little use for independent websites anymore. At the same time, the rise of generative AI suggests a lot of people are just as happy — if not happier — getting life advice, news, and conversation from a robot that has read a bunch of sub-Reddits as they are chatting with internet strangers themselves.

Reddit’s place in the collapsing web is both valuable and risk-laden. Google’s response to the gradual breakdown of the digital commons has been to send more and more people to Reddit, where relevant results are at least probably written by human beings, lavishing the site with traffic but binding the companies’ fates together.

Reddit’s relationship with AI is similarly tense: As a training corpus, Reddit is immensely valuable; after years of unauthorized scraping, the company has official licensing deals with Google, which sometimes turns its content into AI-generated search “Answers,” and with OpenAI, which uses Reddit’s vast archives to give its chatbot depth and outside sourcing and to help it sound like a normal person — or at least a normal redditor. Meanwhile, Reddit moderators are battling a flood of inauthentic content generated by chatbots that were trained, of course, on Reddit. They’re getting tired while users, less certain that other commenters are real — and less sure of their ability to tell and noticing the rising tides of slop elsewhere — are drifting into mutual suspicion.

Huffman suggests that, just as Reddit was rewarded for offering an alternative to more baldly growth-and-ad-driven social media, it could serve a similar role in the post-ChatGPT world as a refuge for actual human interaction in a sea of generated text. “Social media made Reddit make more sense, and I think now that the web is kind of dying, sadly, that evolution helps Reddit make more sense,” he says. “Reddit in that era is, Reddit is not social media. And now, we’re entering this new era where Reddit is not AI.” 

It’s a powerful pitch, to the extent it remains true. But it doesn’t quite capture just how strange and risky Reddit’s position is in 2025. Being one of the last islands of humanity on a dying web may make you more appealing to, well, humans. But it also makes you even more valuable to the companies doing the killing. Reddit is an alternative to a web that’s harvested, polluted, and depleted by tech firms in a race to dominate AI. It’s also an increasingly valuable data source for tech firms in a race to dominate AI. How long can it be both?

Reddit has occupied a series of strange, sometimes contradictory positions in the public imagination over its 20 years of existence: a nerdier alternative to Digg, whose users it inherited after a redesign gone wrong; a platform overwhelmed by young men who were, at different times, in the tank for Ron Paul, Barack Obama, and Bernie Sanders; the world’s leading aggregator of revenge porn; a crusading platform against revenge porn; and a staging ground for Donald Trump’s online campaign, among many others. At different times, and to different people, it was an obscure “dark corner” of the web, an unbearably “cringe” platform downstream from real internet culture (akin to 4chan or, actually, its polar opposite); a platform of free-speech crusaders; a hive of groupthink and censorship; and ground zero for an ongoing retail stock-trading boom that has since outgrown it.

Through it all, the platform has remained in some ways remarkably consistent. (As the critic Alex Pareene wrote a few years ago, Reddit went “from merely embarrassing but occasionally amusing, to actively harmful, to — mainly by accident — essential.”) In 2005, Reddit looked a lot like it does now, a list of links on which users voted up or down. By 2008, it worked a lot like it does now, with comments, sub-Reddits created and run by the community, and the rise of self-posts — threads without links, created to talk, argue, or share things directly.

To a user in 2008, Reddit was legible as a forum of forums, a new and centralized take on the sorts of scattered web communities where people used to spend a lot of time on a much smaller internet. To a user in 2025, this can make it feel like a throwback. We’re further from Reddit’s founding than Reddit’s founding was from the creation of the web browser. It still basically operates within structures and norms established on dial-up bulletin-board services and email lists: communities sorted by interest, volunteer policing, and threads upon threads of text.

Reddit’s formal and cultural stubbornness — and its roots as a mid-aughts gathering place for (mostly) young men interested in technology and the stunted online culture of the time — has helped and haunted it for its entire existence. Huffman, who co-founded the site with his college roommate, Alexis Ohanian, and the late activist Aaron Swartz, left the company after it was acquired by Condé Nast in 2009. (In 2011, Condé Nast spun off Reddit into an investable subsidiary of Advance Publications. Its $10 million investment would eventually be worth more than $2 billion.)

Huffman returned in 2015 after a series of user and moderator revolts driven, in part if not completely, by the attempts of CEO Ellen Pao to figure out what to do about growing communities with names like Jailbait, Pics of Dead Kids, Fat People Hate, and Beating Women. He did so with a mandate to square the platform’s need for growth with the desires of a user base that was incredibly allergic to being told by the company what it could and couldn’t do. “It’s kind of an egotistical thought,” Huffman told New York Magazine at the time, “but I felt like I’m literally the only person in the world who can fix this and I had a moral obligation to do so.” There was resistance within the company, too. “Huffman stepped into what was basically a company on fire and was met by employees who were either disgruntled, burned out, or just done with the drama,” says Christine Lagorio-Chafkin, author of We Are the Nerds, a book about Reddit’s history. “Half the staff left within days.”

This was, in hindsight, the beginning of a long process of growth-and-revenue-oriented taming and professionalization with occasional top-down mandates and a few more user revolts — the most recent in 2023 after the company limited access to developers, threatening third-party apps and tools used by moderators, resulting in mass sub-Reddit blackouts and a moderator exodus. The company by turns tolerated, managed, or crushed user backlash on the way to the big prize: Reddit’s IPO. In May 2024, shares in Reddit started trading on the New York Stock Exchange, its $34 listing price valuing the company at $6.5 billion. In July 2025, shares trade above $150.

“It’s almost as if he made a list of all the things that had haunted Reddit as a site for years and built systems to dismantle them,” Lagorio-Chafkin says of Huffman. In person and as the trollish and frequently maligned “spez” on Reddit, he served for years as a representative of and foil for some of the site’s most vocal (or at least stereotypical) users: a millennial white-guy programmer who enjoys arguing a little too much for his own good. Post-IPO, Huffman is now much wealthier — his shares in the company are worth north $600 million — and, as is customary in his San Francisco cohort, conspicuously muscular. After years of corporate expansion, Reddit is starting to resemble the larger tech companies he likes to use as foils. In 2015, when he returned, Reddit had fewer than 75 employees. Now, it has more than 2,300 staffers and a market cap of $28 billion. It’s also — finally — turning a profit.

It would be an overstatement to say Reddit’s transition into a publicly traded online platform was smooth. “We’ve lost a lot of moderator skill since the IPO,” says one long time volunteer who communicates regularly with Reddit’s leadership. These tens of thousands of moderators aren’t just helpful — they’re operationally crucial, keeping the site organized and (relatively) hospitable.

The 2023 revolt drove a lot of people out, and the loss of third-party tools for dealing with the workload was a pain for the ones who remained. (At the time, Huffman compared protesting mods to entitled “landed gentry”; among volunteers, the episode is still referred to as “fuck spez.”) Before Reddit developed its own replacement tools, another moderator tells me, “We had a solid year of unchecked spam hitting all sub-Reddits.” At the same time, mods were dealing with a new problem: AI. “With text-only subs, we see increased attempts by people generating fake stories,” the moderator says, and discerning the difference between AI posts and typical Reddit comments was suddenly much harder. Image-based sub-Reddits, suddenly glutted with generated material, scrambled to come up with rules — “constantly disputed,” the mod says — and struggled to enforce them. Suddenly, spammers and trolls had superpowers. Earlier this year, researchers at the University of Zurich dispatched “semi-automated, AI-powered accounts,” which identified themselves variously as rape victims, trauma counsellors, and Black men opposed to Black Lives Matter, to a sub-Reddit called /r/changemyview, where the researchers claimed they achieved “persuasive rates between three and six times higher than the human baseline,” leaving users annoyed and moderators enraged. (A majority of the accounts used in the study, however, were flagged at the time by Reddit’s automated systems.)

Meanwhile, the long time mod says, recruiting new help has gotten harder. “People hate you. The people who want to do it are power hungry, and the really good ones burn out.” They also have somewhat less control than they used to (they can no longer lock down their sub-Reddits in protest, for example). “I think the company is under a lot of pressure to remove power for moderators,” he says. “I need more people, but Reddit would like people to have less power.” Laura Nestler, Reddit’s VP of community, says managing mods is crucial to the platform’s survival. “They’re stewarding their communities, they’re building the norms, building the rules and enforcing their independent individual rules,” she says. “Our goal is just to empower moderators and communities to do what they’re gonna do.” Mod drama isn’t a sideshow. Like Wikipedia, Reddit works only if people feel like posting there and if moderators feel like volunteering hours a week — or a day — to keep things clean, civil, or at least functional. Unlike Wikipedia, Reddit is a for-profit company, which makes its volunteer model fragile in different ways. (For an idea of what happens when your army of volunteer contributors loses interest in boosting your company’s bottom line, look no further than the rotting corpse of Quora.) Before the IPO, Reddit offered some long time moderators early access to its stock. Now that they’re volunteering for a public company, though, some are floating another idea: Maybe they’ll need to get paid.

Still, the transition happened, and the admin-mod-user relationship that keeps Reddit running remains more or less intact. “I think what’s underappreciated is that he continued what Ellen started,” Lagorio-Chafkin says — cracking down on hate speech and harassment and building “sturdier internal teams.” As a result, she suggests, Reddit is far larger, more functional, and more diverse than ever, with sub-Reddits for just about any pastime or interest you might come up with, often filled with more people than you might expect. According to the company, Reddit is now used by slightly more women than men, and, unlike a lot of other large platforms, its share of young users is growing. Fandoms have sub-Reddits, and so do brands. The platform functions broadly enough to host, for example, a massive sub-Reddit for Uber-rider stories and complaints (“Driver picked me up with her infant and boyfriend in the car”) as well as a sub-Reddit with more than 420,000 subscribers for Uber drivers (“She peed herself in my car. I can’t blame her”). Any sufficiently popular sub-Reddit eventually spawns a “circlejerk” counterpart in which users mock the host sub-Reddit.

Reddit is also far more international despite English still being the dominant language. It’s not uncommon, particularly in sub-Reddits devoted to personal stories and advice, to realize that the difficult in-laws in question live in Bhopal or that the requested product recommendations need to be available for purchase in Jakarta. More surprising, perhaps, is the persistence of one of Reddit’s less publicized functions, even through its IPO and efforts to court mainstream advertisers: There are still massive amounts of porn on it with thousands of sub-Reddits filled with just about any sort of adult content you can think of and quite a bit more. The largest isn’t even an aggregator: On /r/gonewild, which has more than 5 million subscribers, redditors post nude photos of themselves.

Plenty of the dynamics resemble, as Huffman suggests, an extension of the “old web” ethos of community and connection, albeit enabled by new internet techniques. Once built purely around a unified front page and followed sub-Reddits, users now get algorithmic recommendations. As with any such system, this has the effect of making the platform feel larger and, at times, more isolating. There are also more ads than there used to be (Reddit’s revenue last year was just $1.3 billion, $1.2 billion of which came from advertising).

Still, from the inside, Reddit remains recognizably Reddit. Strains of its dominant 2010s culture have become less important if not less obvious, aging and mutating with some of its most devoted longtime users. There are plenty of kids there talking about kid things, and a surprising number of elderly people, too, but there are also, unmistakably, a ton of American college-educated millennials, many of whom now have jobs and children and whose once-nerdy interests and sensibilities have become, with some help from Reddit itself, genuinely mainstream — so much so that the site’s name on the platform and elsewhere has become a pejorative shorthand for normie millennial tastes.

There are large and active conservative and pro-Trump sub-Reddits, but the largest and most extreme MAGA communities have been officially banned by the company or marginalized in the community, meaning America’s dominant political movement is rendered on the platform’s most popular sub-Reddits as an absurd and enraging external force and as fundamentally incompatible even with Reddit’s commercialized approximation of a shared, deliberative commons. Posts fishing for earnest responses from Trump supporters are more likely to be answered by young liberal redditors venting about their parents. Years of failed attempts to create a conservative alternative to Reddit have instead culminated with a migration back to X, with which Reddit is now engaged in a sort of simmering mega-scale forum war. (Early this year, Elon Musk lashed out at Reddit, where some sub-Reddits had banned links to X, and privately pressured Huffman to step in.)

One way to understand Reddit is as a largely functional, self-sustaining community that its leadership managed to avoid fucking up — an old and sturdy system that remains, against all odds, basically intact. But this alone doesn’t explain its growth or the situation it finds itself in now. For Reddit to grow as it has — suddenly and massively despite largely staying the course — it required some help. First, it needed the web to collapse around it and social networks to chase TikTok into video-recommendation oblivion, leaving readers desperate for anything resembling actual human discussion. Then it needed Google.

In 2019, on the tech-industry Reddit clone Hacker News, users discussed a blog post about missing the “old internet,” pining for the days before it was ruined by the “commercial smog thrown up by Google.” Multiple commenters shared the same advice: “I’ve taken to appending ‘reddit’ to many of my search queries, because flawed though it is, Reddit is one of the few places you can read an actual human thought,” one wrote. Sure, Reddit was still a “cesspool,” full of bullshitters and tiresome “in-jokes” of its own, commenters said, but the advice was well received — and prescient. Reddit users shared the tip, the company itself publicized it, and the “reddit” hack went mainstream.

By 2022, Google had taken notice and adjusted its search algorithms in a way that surfaced Reddit more often, particularly in response to open-ended questions, and said it would guide users toward “helpful content” and more “first-person perspectives.” By 2023, search analysts were tracking dramatic increases in Reddit’s visibility on Google; one report estimated that Reddit had gone from “57 million visits from Google U.S. … in July 2023 to 427 million in April 2024.” Reddit’s own numbers told a similar story: The mature, newly public company, which had been fighting for incremental growth its whole life, was suddenly tracking like a viral start-up, its total traffic growing yearly by half with no signs of slowing down.

At first in its earnings reports, the company was slightly coy about what was going on, emphasizing how important Reddit had become to Google, not the other way around. (“Reddit was the sixth-most-Googled word in the U.S.,” Huffman noted at the time.) Reddit’s disclosures told the story more clearly: It reported that logged-in users — i.e., people who already had Reddit accounts — were up 27 percent globally, while its logged-out visitor numbers were up 70 percent. There are plenty of reasons the internet feels more Reddit these days, but none are as important, nor as straightforward, as this: Google, in an effort to cope with its own rotting search index, has been sending us there by the hundred million.

In an interview, Huffman emphasized that this isn’t entirely new and that Google has been sending people to Reddit in unpredictable quantities for years: “We get a ton of traffic from Google today. We know that’s not forever. We’ve seen it in our history. It comes and goes.” While a recent collapse in Google traffic has been a disaster for e-commerce operations and online publishers, Huffman says, such changes wouldn’t be a disaster because — again — Reddit remains Reddit. “We have a lot of content that Google likes, and the reason Google likes it is because we didn’t generate it for them,” he says.

But without the massive assist from Google, the past few years of Reddit’s story look quite different. Adam Bumas, an analyst with research firm Garbage Media, has been tracking upvotes on popular sub-Reddits since Reddit shut off access for most outside tracking tools. Despite the influx of new visitors, this sort of active participation has remained flat — a story, Bumas says, of “maintaining rather than growing.” Without Google’s firehose of visitors, other risks come to the fore: competition from platforms like Discord, the real-time chat platform popular with younger users, where many sub-Reddits already have a presence; the growing preference among advertisers for video rather than text; and, of course, the rise of chatbots.

There are also reasons to suspect that, today, Reddit’s past relationship with Google may not be a reliable guide. Google’s uses for Reddit aren’t just about search, nor have they been merely convenient: In February 2024, the company announced it was “expanding its partnership” with Google, allowing for “new ways for Reddit content to be displayed across Google products” but also for Google — which was by then spending tens of billions of dollars a quarter pivoting to AI — to train its models on Reddit’s vast corpus of “authentic human conversations and experiences.” For Google, spooked by the rise of ChatGPT, this was urgent. By May, it had rolled out AI-generated “answers” above its search results, many of which were clearly drawn from the platform, but which, by design, were far less likely to send users there.

When the feature made headlines for a viral AI-generated search result that suggested adding glue to a pizza recipe, the backstory implicated Reddit: Google’s AI had misread an 11-year-old joke from a Reddit user called “fucksmith.” It was funny, of course, but also told a particular story about the future of the platform. Reddit — the last website, the imperfect and commercially conflicted steward of the “promise of the internet” — was being harvested to train tools that purport to be able to do a lot of what Reddit users do for one another: answer questions, provide recommendations, open rabbit holes, indulge argument, and waste time. It was training its own replacement.

From inside the platform, Reddit’s relationship with AI is unremarkable. There are large active communities of AI enthusiasts sharing productivity hacks as well as sub-Reddits full of apocalyptic doomers, sci-fi optimists, and total skeptics. Users routinely call out comments that appear to be AI-generated and lament the rise of AI slop outside of Reddit’s (relatively) safe perimeter. Moderators see a rise in AI-generated engagement bait and comments — more, they say, than Huffman admits — but they don’t see it as a crisis, at least not yet. As a business, Reddit has been pushing further into AI-powered moderation and has polled users about AI content-creation tools. With users, it has moved cautiously, launching an internal AI search tool that lets users browse threads through a chat interface. To advertisers, it has been a little more aggressive, pitching them an “AI-powered social listening tool designed to unlock strategic value from Reddit’s 20 years of conversations.”

But Reddit’s careful approach to AI features is misleading: Except for Wikipedia, maybe, no independent website has provided as much raw training data for as many AI firms, authorized or not, as Reddit. As a corpus for machines trying to sound or reason like people, it’s immensely valuable: pre-organized, pre-moderated, cleaned and sorted by the input of millions of volunteers and users, and written, unlike so much else on the web, without SEO, traffic, or advertisers in mind. Likewise, its relationship with OpenAI runs deeper than the deal announced in early 2024 through which Reddit licensed data to OpenAI for training and to bring Reddit content directly into ChatGPT. In 2015, the day after OpenAI was founded, Sam Altman, in a joint interview with Musk, mused that “all of the Reddit data would be a very useful training set” for building future AI; earlier that year, Altman, who had by then known Huffman for a decade, helped orchestrate his return as CEO but not before serving as CEO himself for a week. Altman was an early investor in Reddit and sat on its board until 2022.

Huffman, who still regularly speaks with Altman, is hardly an AI skeptic. But when it comes to AI’s impact on Reddit — at least in his capacity as a CEO — he’s fairly sanguine about the future. “There are times the AI is superpowerful, and there are times when you just don’t want it,” he says. Sure, some of what people get from Reddit, they may soon be able to get from chatbots trained on it. “It can give you lots of decent answers to a wide variety of questions,” Huffman says. And there’s no doubt AI will rip through the economy of the web, which is already filled with cheap and largely replaceable content. “AI is going to kill the bullshit because AI is better at bullshit,” he adds.

Reddit has plenty of bullshit too. But a lot of questions brought to Reddit, Huffman says, are questions without clear answers — the sorts of questions where, even if you’re not asking them yourself, you’re there to read what other people think, work things through, argue, and joke around. “I think what will stay constant is that human beings want to talk to each other,” he says. “People like talking. They like asking questions, they like hearing answers, they like giving answers, they like having a few laughs, they like being helpful.” The big social platforms don’t offer that anymore, and chatbots can’t either. “The core of Reddit actually becomes more valuable over time when the rest of the internet turns into AI.”

In the background, though, Reddit has started acting a bit more paranoid. As a measure against bot-generated content, Reddit is reportedly considering partnering with World ID, an iris-scanning crypto and identity start-up (started, of course, by Sam Altman). The company recently sued OpenAI competitor Anthropic for allegedly scraping its “vast corpus of public content” for its “enormous utility” and has threatened to sue the university researchers who ran the undercover AI experiment. Meanwhile, brands, advertisers, and spammers are reportedly swarming the platform hoping to cash in on Reddit’s visibility in both Google Search and in AIs trained on and monitoring its posts.

As insular and resilient as Reddit has been, it’s a resource that needs to be maintained and one that could be depleted. The through-line in Reddit’s history is that it has always been forced to answer to its users and thousands of volunteer moderators, whether or not what they were demanding made sense for Reddit as a community or a company. In some ways, this dynamic surely held them back. But just as clearly, in hindsight, it probably kept the entire project alive.

Huffman likes to emphasize that Reddit has been through a lot. When it launched, nobody was using the internet on smartphones, and the tiny company saw MySpace, Friendster, and Xanga as unassailable incumbents. It watched as they collapsed and were replaced with true giants, which shape-shifted as they grew, all the while remaining fundamentally and stubbornly the same. “Look, we’ve been around 20 years,” he says. “So we have, I think, some perspective and comfort with the way the internet evolves.”

When I ask about risks, he spins to synergies. The trashing of the web, the lavish attention from Google and AI firms, the scrutiny of investors who care about returns above all — these are fundamentally aligned with Reddit’s interests and will carry it to the next billion users. Huffman is more optimistic than ever about Reddit’s internal tensions, too, having gotten, in his view, the platform’s worst instincts under control. He recalls with clear satisfaction a recent conversation with a longtime moderator: “He’s like, ‘As a shareholder, how are you thinking about growth?’ And I was just like, Oh, hallelujah.” Reddit’s most devoted volunteers, he says, “used to tell us not to grow.”

By John Herrman

Sourced from Intelligencer

By Jodie Cook

You don’t need money to grow on LinkedIn. You need sharp opinions and strong proof.

Most people stay invisible because they say the same things as everyone else. Playing it safe keeps you broke. The pain of playing small is watching louder, less qualified people get the clients you wanted.

If you’re tired of watching opportunities pass you by while others claim your market share and dream clients, this changes now. These five LinkedIn hacks transform your presence from invisible to irresistible. No ad spend required. Just strategy, consistency, and the courage to stand out.

Master the art of LinkedIn disruption: become famous in your niche

Post contrarian takes that challenge beliefs

Your niche has accepted truths that nobody questions. Challenge them. Not to be difficult, but to start conversations that make you memorable. When you post something that means people pause and think “wait, is that true?” you’ve won half the battle.

Start with industry assumptions everyone accepts. Maybe your field believes cold outreach is dead. Share why it’s more alive than ever, with proof. Perhaps everyone thinks you need certifications to succeed. Show them your results that prove otherwise. The goal isn’t controversy for attention. It’s offering fresh perspectives backed by real experience. Your contrarian view consistently delivers insights others miss.

Comment with original ideas that build authority

Comments build your brand faster than posts, and they’re easier to write. But the opportunity in comments is even bigger because fewer people do them well. AI-generated platitudes arrive in droves, so when someone adds something real, people notice.

Contribute effectively by adding layers to the conversation. When someone shares a strategy, share the edge case where it failed for you and what you learned. When they celebrate a win, ask the question that digs deeper into the process. Your comments should make the original poster think “I hadn’t considered that.” Original thinking in comments positions you as someone worth following. And best of all, it’s free.

Share weekly proof that demonstrates results

Screenshots tell stories. Once every week, share visual proof of your work. Client transformations. Revenue graphs. Behind-the-scenes processes. Keep a folder on your computer called “wins” and add every casual testimonial until you have a bunch.

Your proof doesn’t need to be million-dollar wins. Share the email where a client thanked you. The before-and-after of a project you transformed. The metric that moved because of your expert insight. Weekly proof posts accomplish two things: they show you’re actively working (not just talking), and they demonstrate exactly how you create value. No one can argue with results they can see.

DM engaged followers with strong offers

Now you have the visibility, take action. Dominating your niche only matters if people are willing to pay for your specialist knowledge. When someone engages with your content, assume they are interested and have raised their hand. Then don’t let the moment pass. Turn every comment, every reaction, every profile view from your dream clients into a conversation.

Get in the habit of sending DMs. Not “thanks for the like” messages. Chats you’d have with a friend. Ask a question that shows you noticed what they’re building. Share a resource that solves their specific problem. Make an introduction to someone in your network who can help them. Build familiarity on a one-to-one basis as part of your daily routine.

Pin proof posts for instant credibility

Your profile’s featured section is your billboard. It’s one of the first things visitors to your profile see. Pin your best proof post, the one that instantly shows your authority within your niche. Update it monthly as you generate better results. Don’t let someone scroll down your profile without knowing the extent of your effectiveness.

Maybe it’s the case study where you 10x’d someone’s leads. Perhaps it’s the framework that changed how your industry operates. Whatever you pin should make visitors think “I need to work with this person.” No one cares how long you’ve been in business. They care what you believe, who you help, and how fast you get results.

Dominate on LinkedIn by showing up differently: get serious about your personal brand

Say it clearly, say it often, and dominate your niche by showing up daily on LinkedIn and optimizing everything around your main message. Post contrarian takes, comment with original messages, and share weekly proof. DM your engaged followers and make your results impossible to miss. You’re probably wasting time on LinkedIn right now. You could be spending that same amount of time getting actual results. Follow these steps to do it.

Optimize your LinkedIn profile to attract ideal coaching and consultancy clients.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Jodie Cook

Find Jodie Cook on LinkedIn. Visit Jodie’s website.

Sourced from Forbes