Month: August 2021

Social Media Updates: July 2021

Posted on by Hira Nasir

SNAPCHAT LAUNCHES ‘MY PLACES’ TO HIGHLIGHT LOCAL BUSINESSES

Businesses can now be easily discovered on Snapchat through ‘My Places’. This new feature can be found in Snap Map and highlights three different listing categories;

  • Popular places within a user’s Snap friends
  • Places the user has liked
  • Places that they have previously visited

Users will be able to access full information about the business listed in the platform. From opening times, contact details and locations to reviews and popular times.

With Snapchat users being able to see where their friends are at any given time, they can now share the business with them and arrange meetups.

The app explains:

Snapchatters can discover more than 30 million businesses worldwide, log their favourite local spots, and find personalised recommendations informed by their friends and global Snapchat community.

If you want to make changes to the business information already displayed or add a new business listing, choose the Place Listing Addition via the Map itself or make changes through the Map settings.

INSTAGRAM INTRODUCES AUTO CAPTIONS FOR FEED POSTS

Instagram is constantly trying to improve accessibility on its app. With the recent auto-caption option being introduced for IGTV uploads and Stories, the platform is now looking to expand this feature for Feed posts.

The news was confirmed by Vishal Shah, VP of Product at Instagram, as he responded to a user’s request of needing auto-captions for feed posts.

https://twitter.com/thebkh/status/1414969591374270467

With more people using Instagram as they go about their day, such as during a commute or while watching TV, the need for both sound on and sound off content has increased massively as brands need audiences to get the full context of posts they upload.

As per Andrew Hutchinson from Social Media Today, this new addition will provide both content creators and brands another option to improve accessibility, maximise viewership and reduce workload as they won’t have to add captions and hardcode them into the video clips themselves. 

TWITTER IS RETIRING ITS ‘FLEETS’ OPTION 

After less than a year, Twitter has decided to retire Fleets, its own version of Instagram and Snapchat stories. The decision has been made as a result of the new feature not getting as much traction as Twitter had hoped for.

Twitter users have only been using them for the purpose of amplifying their own Tweets. This defeated the whole purpose of Fleets which was to add a broader tweet experience on the platform, especially for those that wanted to share their thoughts temporarily.

Twitter further explains:

We built Fleets as a lower-pressure, ephemeral way for people to share their fleeting thoughts. We hoped it would help more people feel comfortable joining the conversation on Twitter. But, in the time since we introduced Fleets to everyone, we haven’t seen an increase in the number of new people joining the conversation like we hoped.

The platform will instead shift its focus into expanding its audio.

FACEBOOK LAUNCHES THE ‘CAMPAIGN IDEAS GENERATOR’ FOR BUSINESSES

Screenshot of Facebook’s Campaign Idea Generator site.

If you ever feel stuck for ideas for your Facebook and Instagram campaigns, Facebook’s new Campaign Ideas Generator may be a great solution to help spark inspiration for your future promotional efforts.

This new resource site contains various insights, templates and recommendations specific to seasonal events and business types. Whether you’re a restaurant, an education company or provide financial services – the Campaign Ideas Generator has ‘cookie-cutter type solutions’ for all industries based on the time of the year they’ll be running their promotions.

The tool is made up of three sections: Campaign Ideas, Data and Insights and Resources and is ideal for small businesses that don’t have much marketing budget.

If your business is feeling stuck with your marketing approach, why not get in touch with our expert team and find out how we can help you maximise your promotional efforts and contribute towards reaching your business goals? Feel free to also check out our blog for all the latest digital marketing updates.

SEO Market Updates: July 2021

Posted on by George Bonelle

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

July 2021 Core Algorithm Update Rollout

On 1st July, the second round of Google’s two-part core updates began rolling out, this was then “effectively” complete by the 12th of July.

Much like the June 2021 Core Update, there were no specifics on what the broad update entailed – with the only given information explaining that a core algorithm update introduces changes across a wide range of indexing and ranking processes, implicating that core updates are not intended to target one specific factor.

Google has previously stated that sites which experience a drop after a core update may not actually have anything wrong to fix. The advice offered in this situation is to focus on “ensuring you’re offering the best content you can. That’s what our algorithms seek to reward”.

More information and advice on what site owners should know about core updates can be found in this Google Search Central Blog.  

Google Categorises Causes For Organic Traffic Drops

Off the back of two broad core updates, Google released a document titled “Analyzing Google Search traffic drops”, this provided site owners with illustrations of different drops in organic traffic that a site may experience, along with explanations to help identify and categorise the causes for each.

Examples of Google Search organic traffic drops

According to Google, there are five main causes for drops in organic traffic:

  • Technical issues: Errors that can prevent Google from crawling, indexing, or serving your pages to users – for example, server availability, robots.txt fetching, page not found, and others.
  • Security issues: If your site is affected by a security threat, Google may alert users before they reach your site with warnings or interstitial pages, which may decrease Search traffic.
  • Manual Actions: If your site does not comply with Google’s guidelines, some of your pages or the entire site may be omitted from Google Search results through a Manual Action.
  • Algorithmic changes: Google is always improving how it assesses content and updating its algorithm accordingly; core updates and other smaller updates may change how some pages perform in Google Search results.
  • Search interest disruption: Sometimes changes in user behaviour will change the demand for certain queries, either as a result of a new trend, or seasonality throughout the year.

This is the first time Google has openly shared information like this, and from the reaction across forums and social media it has been very much welcomed.

Google Now Showing Why A Specific Result Was Ranked

To provide further transparency, Google is now showing more information within the ‘About This Result’ section in search. There are now several factors that can be given as to why Google has ranked a specific result within SERPs, these will be listed as bullet points under “Your search & this result”.

Here’s what that looks like:

About This Result Example

This largely confirms what SEOs and marketers already knew as to why Google ranks specific sites for certain queries, but having all factors listed together could provide a useful tool when investigating an unexpected result.

Currently, this is only available for English results in the U.S, but it is expected to be rolled out across other counties (including the UK) in the coming months.

Google Says You Should Keep Redirects Live For At Least A Year

As a response to questions regarding how long you should keep redirections in place, Gary Illyes from Google took to Twitter to provide a “concrete answer”, saying redirects should remain in place for “at least 1 year”.

The Twitter thread goes on to explain that one year allows enough time for Google to pass any signals from the origin URL to the destination URL, any signals passed will then remain associated to the destination URL, even after the redirect has been removed.

It is also still worth noting that, if possible, site owners should strive to keep redirects live indefinitely for the user’s benefit.

SeekToAction Video Markup Now Supported In Google Search

Back in May 2021, Google pre-announced SeekToAction as one of two new video content structured data markups. At the time this was still in the developmental / testing phase, this is now officially supported within Google search, meaning video key moments can now be shown within Google Search.

Looking something like this:

SeekToAction Key Moments Rich Result

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.