Social Media Updates: February 2020

Instagram adds ‘Least Interacted With’ and ‘Most Shown in Feed’ following tab

Instagram has recently added two new lists within the following tab, which enable you to see the accounts that get the most visibility in your feed and those who you choose not to engage with as often.

The update provides a list of accounts you don’t engage with a lot and recommends people who you should unfollow. This is to give users more control over their ‘algorithm-defined’ feed.

For example, if you don’t like some of the accounts on the list, or if there are inactive accounts on there, you can remove or unfollow them as well.

The second tab allows you to see the accounts that frequently appear in your feed and whose posts you regularly engage with – this can make it easier for Instagram to suggest new content and accounts for you to like and follow.

 

Andrew Hutchinson from Social Media Today said: “In terms of business use, it could help you pinpoint fans who are no longer engaged in your messaging, highlighting content variables that you may want to shift.”

Another minor update alongside this is the option to reply to stories with GIFs. It is a fairly minor update, but now you can reply to any story with a selection of GIPHY GIFs. To do so, just search by keyword in the reply text box and send.

 

Twitter releases ‘Manipulated Media’ policy to limit fake content

Twitter has recently released its official rule against users posting fake, deceptive or manipulated content, whilst also launching a tag for ‘detected’ edited material.

The updates to detect and also prevent fake information include:

  • Notifying which Tweets share synthetic or manipulated media.
  • Warning users before they share or like Tweets with synthetic or manipulated media.
  • Adding a link – for example, to a news article or Moment – so that people can read more about why various sources believe the media is fake or manipulated.

Twitter explained the update: “When you come to Twitter to see what’s happening in the world, we want you to have context about the content you’re seeing and engaging with.

“Deliberate attempts to mislead or confuse people through manipulated media undermine the integrity of the conversation.”

This will help to aid the ‘fake news’ agenda often promoted within the app.

Vine revamp as ‘Byte’ to rival TikTok

The co-founder of Vine has now officially launched Byte, which is said to be the second coming of former short-second video app Vine. The app is essentially Vine (creator videos up to seven seconds) with updated features and focus.

The app is said to rival record-breaking TikTok with Byte also making headlines as the most-downloaded social app in the US on its first weekend of launch.

In addition to the functionalities of Vine, Byte will eventually enable users to monetise their content. At launch, Byte lacks any of the additional remix, AR and effects tools available on TikTok currently.

Byte is currently featured on iOS and Android.

If you’re interested in finding out even more about social media and how it can boost your brand, get in touch with the team at Fusion Unlimited today.

SEO Market Updates: January 2020

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

Google’s January Algorithm Update

Google released a broad core algorithm on 13th January, which was rolled out over the following 2 weeks. We covered the initial release of this update in a dedicated blog post, which provides a rundown of the update and some useful optimisation information.

Looking at SEMRush’s sensor tool, we can see how the algorithm impacted UK rankings:

As with all broad core algorithm updates, these target the entire algorithm, rather than having a specific focus, such as site speed or content. Due to this, if a site it negatively impacted by this update, we would recommend checking aspects within Google’s core update help sheet, or checking out the checklist in our blog that covers the January 2020 core update.

Google Chrome 80

Google Chrome 80 is due to be released at the start of February. It will contain updates that impact cookies, push notifications and mixed content.

Cookies

Google are recommending that developers define the cookies that a site uses. With the option to choose between two settings (SameSite=Strict or SameSite=Lax), web developers will be able to define if a cookie is to be sent in first party or same-site content (Lax is a good choice for cookies affecting the display of the site, with Strict being useful for cookies related to actions your user is taking). Google also provided the following caution surrounding how these will impact the site’s security:

“Neither Strict nor Lax are a complete solution for your site’s security. Cookies are sent as part of the user’s request and you should treat them the same as any other user input. That means sanitizing and validating the input. Never use a cookie to store data you consider a server-side secret.”

Push Notifications

The infamously annoying pop-up notification requests that appear on sites are currently within Google’s scope to tackle.

Google have recognised common complaints surrounding push notifications from websites and are looking to block these, as well as enroll their “Quiet UI”.

They will be looking to block push notifications for the following scenarios:

  • For users who consistently block push notifications.
  • For websites that have low opt-in rates for their notifications.

Google’s new “Quiet UI” will alert users that these notifications have been blocked; giving the user an opportunity to unblock the notification.

Quiet UI will be available on both desktop and mobile devices.

Mixed Content

As mentioned in a previous blog post, Google are looking to crack down on mixed content on sites. From Google Chrome 79 to 81, Google will be looking to implement stricter rules on how they treat mixed content. With Google Chrome 80 due to be released, Google will implement the following rules:

  • Mixed audio and video resources will be auto-upgraded to https://, and Chrome will block them by default if they fail to load over https://. Chrome 80 will be released to early release channels in January 2020. Users can unblock affected audio and video resources with the setting described above.
  • Mixed images will still be allowed to load, but they will cause Chrome to show a “Not Secure” chip in the omnibox. We anticipate that this is a clearer security UI for users and that it will motivate websites to migrate their images to HTTPS. Developers can use the upgrade-insecure-requests or block-all-mixed-content Content Security Policy directives to avoid this warning.

With stricter rules being implemented, we would recommend ensuring all resources have been migrated to https. For more information on Google Chrome’s plan to deal with mixed content, please see our dedicated blog post.

Google Updates Their Search Page Design

After rolling out the new search page design on mobile devices in May 2019, Google have now implemented these changed to desktop search pages.

This new design looks to add site icons to organic searches, while removing the green, highlight AD marker from ads and replacing it with a more discreet, and bolded, AD marker.

After rolling this out, Google has announced that they will be experimenting further with the desktop design.

Google Search Console’s New Removals Tool

Google have launched the new version of the removals report within Google Search Console. This report will contain the following features:

  • Temporary removals will allow users to remove specific content from Google Search results.
    • ‘Temporarily remove URL’ will hide the URL from Google Search results for about six months and clear the cached copy of the page.
    • ‘Clear cache URL’ clears the cached page and wipes out the page description snippet in Search results until the page is crawled again.
  • Outdated content segment will provide information on removal requests made through the public Remove Outdated Content
  • SafeSearch Filtering section will display any pages on a site that have been reported to Google by users as adult content using the SafeSearch Suggestions

WordPress Look to Add Lazy-Loading as Default

Documentation surrounding WordPress’s 5.4 update suggests that WordPress are looking to implement lazy-loading as part of WordPress core. If added, this will be implemented by adding the loading attribute to img tags within the html on the page, rather than adding this with JavaScript code.

Currently, the loading attribute is compatible with the following browsers:

  • Google Chrome
  • Chrome for Android
  • Android Browser
  • Microsoft Edge
  • Opera

Google Adds Popular Products to Search

Available only to US users at present, Google have released a “popular products” segment within Google Search pages.

This new segment is an extension of Google Shopping and will display products in relation to the users search, as well as a list of sites that sell time item, the price this is sold at and reviews for the product.

It is free for participating retailers to appear within these search features, as long as the products adhere to Google’s best practices.

Check out our latest blog posts 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.