Month: December 2019

Social Media Updates: December 2019

Posted on by Jorgie McHale-Ramsell

TikTok hits 1.5 billion downloads

TikTok was one of the most popular apps of last year with videos on average earning 17 billion views each month. Since then, the app has continued to grow as TikTok has now hit 1.5 billion downloads across the App Store and Google Play, according to Sensor Tower. TikTok is now the third most downloaded app in the world as well as the only app in the top five which is not owned by Facebook.

Although the app is known for users hosting short skits and dance videos, brands are now beginning to take advantage of the billions of monthly views and users. Calvin Klein and FIFA have already created influencer marketing campaigns in the past few months on TikTok.

Clothing brand GUESS created a campaign on the app which challenged users to post videos wearing their favourite denim clothing in order to expand the reach of their brand to a new, younger audience. The campaign was very successful in doing so, with the hashtag #InMyDenim gaining over 38,000,000 views since it launched.

According to Forbes, TikTok might be the ‘next big thing’ when it comes to influencer marketing.

Instagram launches ‘pressure to be perfect’ toolkit

Instagram has published two brand new guides; one for parents and one for teens. Each will guide them to a better understanding of the app and how to use it safely. The guides touch on how young people can manage the potential psychological impacts of using the app on a daily basis.

This comes after the removal of post likes to make users feel more comfortable with the content they post. The app has since been working to implement protective measures for more vulnerable or sensitive people who use the app.

Instagram’s guide states: “Pressure to be Perfect is about recognizing that what you see posted by others is just one part of their story – a single post or video rarely reflects all that is happening behind the scenes.

“That realization can help free us from the pressure of thinking we need to conform to a certain set of standards when we post.

“Moving from a mindset of comparing yourself with others to one where you are thoughtfully sharing yourself with others, could help make the time you spend on Instagram more intentional and rewarding.”

The guide also includes tips on how to make Instagram work for you as well as quizzes about maintaining perspective and responding with kindness.

Twitter introduces the option to hide tweet replies

Twitter has recently announced that its new Hide Replies feature will eventually be rolled out to users worldwide.

After successful testing, the ‘Hide Tweet’ option means a chosen reply to a tweet can be hidden from your timeline as well as everyone else’s.  However, users then have the option to view hidden replies on any tweet to see what has removed.

This feature means if a user wants to keep a conversation flowing, they can remove any irrelevant or unnecessary replies.

Twitter explained the feature: “Repliers can shift the topic or tone of a discussion and derail what you and your audience want to talk about. To give you more control over the conversations you start, we tested the option for you to hide replies to your Tweets. We learned that the feature is a useful new way to manage your conversations.”

If you’re interested in finding out more about social media and what it can do for your brand, get in touch with us today.

SEO Market Updates: November 2019

Posted on by Zack Cornick

Join Fusion’s SEO team as they round up last month’s major industry updates.

Google Chrome Will Warn Users of Slow Sites

Google have announced their plans to display warnings to users on how quickly a site may load when using Google Chrome.

Rather than immediately setting a page speed score that pages will need to hit in order to avoid receiving this warning, google plan on setting a very lenient criteria and increasing this over time.

For more information on this update, including details on how to avoid receiving this warning, please see our dedicated blog post…

Google Search Console’s New Page Speed Report

As Google continues to stress the importance of page speed in regards to site performance and rankings, they have released the new speed report within Google Search Console.

Utilising data from Google’s Chrome User Experience Report, this report will split pages into 3 categories; fast, medium and slow. This will also allow webmasters to see what issues are slowing pages down. The below table shows how Google defines slow to fast pages:

Fast Moderate Slow
FCP <1s <3s >=3s
FID <100ms <300ms >=300ms
  • FCP (first contentful paint): The time from when the user requests the URL until the browser renders the first visible element in the URL. This is important because it tells the reader that the URL is actually loading.
  • FID (first input delay): The time from when a user first interacts with your page (when they clicked a link, tapped on a button, and so on) to the time when the browser responds to that interaction. This measurement is taken from whatever interactive element that the user first clicks. This is important on pages where the user needs to do something, because this is when the page has become interactive.

Although Google has classified this report as “experimental” and have informed that they will continue to improve this, the page speed report is currently available to all users, rather than being part of a closed beta.

Google Launch Site Kit for WordPress

In order to improve integration between Google products and WordPress, Google released Site Kit. Site Kit is a WordPress plugin which will provide the following benefits:

  • Easy-to-understand stats directly on your WordPress dashboard
  • Official insights from multiple Google tools
  • Aggregated insights from Google products, distilled in a dashboard that your clients or other teams can easily access. No need to copy data from multiple products to compile reports for clients.
  • Site performance stats and improvement recommendations that come directly from Google – webmasters will be getting the latest best practices recommended by Google products.

Enabling this plugin will give users access to the following Google tools:

This plugin is free to install here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/google-site-kit/

Product Filters Added to Google Search Console

Google have announced the addition of the new product filter within the search appearance report of Google Search Console. This new filter will report on the performance of product rich results, as shown below:

This new report will provide a dedicated view of the performance of the product within Google search, which can help with viewing trend data and comparing these results with other rich results.

Check out our latest Social Media market updates for the latest news, and if you’re interested in finding out more about what we can do for your brand, get in touch with us today.