Instagram launches digital magazine ‘Instagram Insider’

Instagram has launched its first ever edition of the new digital magazine, Instagram Insider. Every issue will highlight core Instagram trends dominating the platform, list the most influential content creators and small businesses to follow as well as answering users’ questions. 

The first 9-page edition is focused on fashion and beauty which has 4 main trending topics: arts and crafts, which is all about handmade products such as clothing, home décor and accessories. Psychedelia-inspired outfit looks, DIY stick-on beauty products from fake tattoos to glam eye art, and male beauty products.

This free, downloadable magazine is aimed at users who constantly scroll through their feed, Explore and Shop tab, liking and saving posts.

‘Instagram Insider is about inspiration and discovery – not just the trends (crafty quilted fashion, stick on beauty products, vintage streetwear) but the people behind them.’

However, the magazine also provides plenty of information for brands so they can shape their own Instagram strategies and find new angles for their stories and posts.

TikTok launches lead gen ads

Businesses and advertisers can now gain more insights into their audiences through TikTok’s Lead Generation form. This tool will enable marketers and businesses of all sizes to create seamless interactions to reach their target audience and convert them into customers.

As the app further explains:

‘We want to support and empower businesses on TikTok with seamless opportunities to connect deeply with their customers while ensuring that our community feels comfortable and safe on the platform. This is of the utmost importance to us.’

The Lead Generation consists of a customisable background image, profile image and questionnaire. This means that brands will be able to share details of their products or services in an appealing and interesting way.

Users will be able to signal their interest to the product or service by filling out an easy step-by-step form where they will provide basic information such as name, email address, phone number and answer any additional questions the business would want to know.

TikTok has ensured to provide a simple and efficient experience between businesses and users by auto-populating key response data already available about the user (name etc.).

Any leads gained through this tool can be manually downloaded at the business’s preferred time or integrated with the business’s CRM where they’ll be immediately activated.

This is a great addition to the platform as businesses will be able to build a more accurate audience view for future content and ad campaigns.

Facebook flags changes to newsfeed rankings

Facebook is looking to change its News Feed algorithm to maximise engagement and user retention. This process will consist of user surveys asking people what they like to see on their feed, whether a post is valuable, inspirational or worth their time. Soliciting different types of feedback and deciding whether a post should be higher up or lower down the news feed based on different types of reactions (angry, emotional etc.)

Although users’ news feeds contain posts from friends, groups and pages they’ve chosen to like or follow, they don’t want to see posts about topics they are not interested in. This survey-driven approach will give the platform a complete view of the types of posts people find most valuable and inspiring and what kind of content they don’t want to see on their news feed.

Additionally, with political debates being at an all-time high on Facebook, the platform has received feedback on political content with many users being displeased with the aggressive and divisive political debates.

Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg states:

‘Increasingly, we’re hearing feedback from people that they’re seeing too much content about politics and too many other kinds of posts and comments that detract from their News Feed experience. This is a sensitive area, so over the next few months, we’ll work to better understand what kinds of content are linked with these negative experiences.’

Lastly, users can also more directly tell Facebook about their preferences by hiding posts they’re not interested in within their news feed. This will inform the platform’s algorithms about what you don’t want to see as well as giving users better control over their feed.

To read our monthly social media updates, check out our blog page, or get in touch with us today to find out how we can help your brand make the most of social media.

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

New Page Experience Report in Google Search Console

Google has launched a new Page Experience report within Google Search Console to help site owners better prepare for the rollout of the upcoming page experience update. The report includes existing Core Web Vitals along with the other page experience signals, listed as Mobile Usability, Security Issues, HTTPS and Ad Experience.

Speaking about this new feature, Google has said “The Page Experience report offers valuable metrics, such as the percentage of URLs with good page experience and search impressions over time, enabling you to quickly evaluate performance”.

Here’s what the new report looks like:

More information on the report’s full capabilities can be found in the Page Experience Report Google help document.

Along with this, Google has also introduced the ability to filter pages by ‘Good Page Experience’ within the GSC Performance report, allowing site owners to easily keep track of how pages with “Good Page Experience” compare to others on the site.

Google Postpone Page Experience Rollout and Provide More Insight

In a blog post providing “More time, tools, and details”, Google has stated that the Page Experience update will be a gradual rollout, beginning in mid-June 2021 and not playing a full role as part of their ranking systems until the end of August. Meaning the update will now finish much later than the original rollout schedule of May 2021.

Google gave the following reasoning for the update being rolled out gradually rather than in real time, “because we’re doing this as a gradual rollout, we will be able to monitor for any unexpected or unintended issues”.

Google Updated How Cumulative Layout Shift is Scored

Changes have been made to how Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is calculated, CLS is a measurement of a web page’s visual stability and is one of the Core Web Vital metrics. Google has updated how this is scored to make it more accurate and fair, stating they are “making the CLS metric more fair to pages that are open for a long time”.

Google now reviews CLS on each page in session windows, here’s a visual representation of this new approach:

Layout shifts can occur sporadically over the time a user views a page, for this reason, Google has decided to group them into session windows. The CLS metric now follows this rule: “maximum session window with 1 second gap, capped at 5 seconds”.

Site owners should not however worry about this change. Because the new update caps the CLS calculation window at 5 seconds, Google say “no page will have a worse score as a result of this”.

More Improvements To Google Search Console

Google has improved data filtering and comparison within the Google Search Console Performance report by introducing a regular expression (regex) filter and ‘revamping’ the comparison mode.

Google explained that the new regular expression filter will help “create more complex query and page based filters”. This new feature will allow Search Console users to catch abbreviated queries within a filtered search, for example when looking at performance for a particular query like ‘gin and tonic’, the new regex filter can be used to capture all similarly relates searches such as ‘gin & tonic’ or ‘g&t’.

The newly revamped comparison mode now permits users to select and compare multiple metrics by displaying results side-by-side, the table area is almost doubled in size and does now support the new regex filter.

Google Rollout New Product Reviews Update

Google has released a new product reviews search algorithm update. This is not a core update affecting all search results, it is specifically targeted at rewarding more in-depth, informative product reviews within SERPs.

“We know people appreciate product reviews that share in-depth research, rather than thin content that simply summarizes a bunch of products. That’s why we’re sharing an improvement to our ranking systems, which we call the product reviews update, that’s designed to better reward such content”.

Additional useful information on what creators should know about Google’s product reviews update has been provided within the Google Search Central Blog.

If you found this update useful, 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 the team today.