Daily Minute Master Series – May 17, 2019

Social Media

Facebook Announces Two New Algorithm Updates Aimed at Improving On-Platform Engagement

The Social Network has announced two News Feed algorithm updates this week, one focused on increasing the prevalence of posts from your closest friends, and the other aimed at reducing shallow, click-bait style content in feeds. Since the implementation of the News Feed algorithm, Facebook has been consistently criticized for hiding important updates, and failing to keep people in the loop on key events within their social circles. This change aims to help Facebook improve on this front. The second announced update relates to the quality of content in News Feeds, and demoting posts and links which users have said are not ‘worth their time’. The key point here is ‘less’ – Facebook can use this insight to determine not only what’s more relevant, but to reduce the reach of less engaging, less fulfilling link posts. According to Facebook, the update is not aimed at reducing the reach of Pages, but that will be the impact – Pages which regularly publish shallow clickbait will see their News Feed distribution reduced as a result.  

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Instagram Rolls Out Updated Explore Format, Including Stories Content

Instagram is rolling out some changes to its Explore tab, designed to showcase more related trends, and guide users towards its IGTV and on-platform shopping options. Instagram has tweaked the format of the Explore search options to put more focus on the listed content, with the topic tabs along the top of the Explore screen reduced in size. Instagram’s also updated the specific listings for its IGTV and Shop posts. Now, when you tap on the IGTV section, you’ll see a personalized feed of recommended videos from “creators you follow or may want to follow”. With Instagram moving more towards eCommerce, and building out its shopping and on-platform buying options, adding more product discovery tools to Explore makes a lot of sense, and will no doubt be welcomed by users looking to use the platform for such purpose. In addition to this, Instagram’s also adding publicly posted Stories to Explore to further highlight Stories content.

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Marketing

Nextdoor emerges as a location marketing destination

The self-described “world’s largest social network for the neighborhood” is also a location marketing platform for businesses. Nextdoor connects people who live in close geographic proximity to each other. Only users with verified addresses may join, and when they do, Nextdoor assigns them to a neighborhood with defined boundaries. From there, users share a wide range of content, such posting lost-and-found notices, discussing the impact of municipal legislation, organizing public safety meet-ups – and, in recent years, buying and selling services and products. Now Nextdoor is actively catering to businesses in a few important ways. Businesses can claim pages and create organic listings just like they can on Google My Business. The pages give Nextdoor users the chance to rate and review them. Companies can also offer promotions, a recently launched feature. Scaling a presence on Nextdoor likely requires a national or global business to empower local franchises to manage their pages, create offers and respond to reviews given Nextdoor’s restrictions on how many pages a single business can manage.

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Google says image search referrals will not get new source URL (but forgets to tell us)

About 10-months ago, Google told publishers, site owners and tool providers to prepare for a change in how Google Image search will be sending their referral URLs. Instead of Google Image search traffic coming from www.google.com, they wanted to change it to help webmaster understand their image search traffic. So they said in the upcoming months the referral URL will change to images.google.com so your analytics tools can track it better. Google recently posted an update at some saying they are not going ahead with this change and that users can get this data in Google Search Console instead. This means the only way to see your Google Image Search traffic properly is within Google Search Console. That also means there will be at least a two-day delay because Search Console performance reports are always delayed by that length of time.

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