Weekly Social & SEO Updates – 20th May 2024

An image of the logo for X

Check out our weekly roundup of the latest PR, Social and SEO updates that happened Monday 13th May – Sunday 19th May

SEO

Googlebot Crawlers

Google has added two new Googlebot crawlers for image and video.

Google has said that these new crawlers will “better support crawling of binary data that may be used for research and development.”

Site Rankings

Google has also hinted at improving site rankings in their next update.

It’s reevaluating how to reward high-quality content sites within the next core update, which will benefit sites with genuine, high-quality content – which will be essential for any SEO strategy moving forward.

In a series of tweets, Google’s John Mueller said: “I imagine for most sites strongly affected, the effects will be site-wide for the time being, and it will take until the next update to see similar strong effects (assuming the new state of the site is significantly better than before).

“I can’t make any promises, but the team working on this is explicitly evaluating how sites can / will improve in Search for the next update. It would be great to show more users the content that folks have worked hard on, and where sites have taken helpfulness to heart.”

Social Media

It’s been another relatively quiet week for social media updates! There haven’t been too many updates which drastically change anything on our favourite social platforms.

threads

A new layout for the platform has been posted by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, which allows you to create columns dedicated to your topics of interest, and the feeds will show in real-time, for each column.

This could be an important update for Threads, as the platform thrives on live, constant discussion, and the more of these discussions you’re able to see at once can only benefit the platform.

Threads new feed example from Mark Zuckerberg

TikTok

60-minute videos

Long-form videos are coming to TikTok! It’s currently testing 60-minute video uploads on the platform, and while it has steadily increased the duration of video throughout its lifespan, this is a significant increase from the 30-minute videos released at the start of the year.

It seems clear, at least in my mind, that Tiktok’s goal will be to continue to taking traffic away from YouTube and allow content creators who post longer-form videos to feel more confident that they’ll get reliable results on TikTok – especially financially, which is an area where YouTube is still king for creators.

My primary question is: will users watch a one-hour video on TikTok?

#FinTok

TikTok has shared its insights into the increase of financial information and advice on the platform.  

According to TikTok, there has been an overall 373 per cent increase in financial content in the app in the past year. 

They went on to say: “TikTok is the #1 source for financial information among Canadian users under the age of 45 in social and video platforms, surpassing financial institutions’ websites, financial advisors, and family & friends.” 

LinkedIn

You can now reply to specific messages within your chat history in your chat streams, much like you can on Messenger and WhatsApp.

While this option has been available on desktop for some time, by simply hovering over a message, there will now be a way to do it on mobile. It’s a simple but necessary change that should have been made some time ago.

For support and advice on PR, social media and SEO, contact our team.