Check out our weekly roundup of the latest PR, Social and SEO updates that happened Monday 29th April – Sunday 5th May
SEO
As you’ve likely read by now, TikTok is the go-to search engine for Gen Z.
What is surprising though, is that Bing and Yahoo have gained market share.
According to data from GS Statcounter, Google’s search engine market has fallen to its lowest level since the tech giant began tracking its data in 2009. Google’s share has dropped to 86.99 per cent, which is a four per cent decrease from the previous month. This is also the largest single-month decline.
While this data is valuable, as Search Engine Journal points out, it has “certain limitations, as it’s derived from websites with its tracking code installed, which introduces sample bias.”
Social Media
Check out our round-up for the latest social media updates, and whilst we cover all social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Snapchat, X and more, last week saw key updates for LinkedIn, TikTok and Meta platforms.
‘Accelerate Campaigns‘ have launched more widely and will be available for more users. These campaigns work in a comparable way to Meta’s Advantage+ campaigns, and are essentially one-click campaigns creation, tailored to your business needs. Much like with advantage+ campaigns, Accelerate Campaigns work best when they’re supplemented with other, hand-crafted campaigns and ads, instead of relying on them.
LinkedIn has also launched three ‘Thinking-Oriented‘ games, called Queens, Cross Climb and Pin Point. On creating the games, LinkedIn said:
“Our goal at LinkedIn is to continue to find ways to bring professionals together to stay informed and connected. That’s why starting today, we’re weaving thinking-oriented games directly into the LinkedIn experience. We want to give people a way to exercise their brains while taking a quick break, but also give people a reason to connect with others. We hope that these games spark banter, conversations, and even a healthy bit of competition among professionals around the world.”
If you think this is a bit left field, it’s a genius move to get more users to sign up to play these games and to log in daily to LinkedIn. If they have a hit like Wordle on their hands, it’ll be one of the most genius moves in social media history we’ve seen.
Thanks to the new EU Digital Services Act (DSA), all large online platforms are required to report their EU user counts for transparency. Last week, LinkedIn reported it had 47.9 million monthly active users in the EU, which is an increase of 2.7 million since October last year. This does not include the UK, as we’re no longer part of the EU.
TikTok
Good news for music lovers! TikTok and Universal Music Group (UMG) have finally signed a “multi-dimensional” deal to bring songs from massive artists like Drake, Harry Styles, Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift back to the platform.
TikTok and UMG have agreed to work together “to ensure AI development across the music industry will protect human artistry and the economics that flow,” which was a key concern for UMG.
As always, it was the smaller artists who were most hurt by having their music removed from the platform, so to see their music added back will be a huge relief.
meta
It looks like Instagram is experimenting with a new option that enables users to hide the UI and description buttons on Reels clips, giving you a cleaner viewing experience.
The EU has launched a formal investigation into Meta over poor efforts to combat Russian disinformation on Facebook and Instagram.
This may lead to more safety measures implemented by Meta, to ensure misinformation isn’t spread. One method X, formally Twitter, has implemented is ‘Community Notes’, where users can add context to posts, with evidence, to support or disprove what someone is posting.
PR
OpenAI will train its AI models on the Financial Times’ journalism
The Financial Times has become the latest news organisation to announce a deal with OpenAI.
Recently, AI art has actually been getting worse, thanks to the amount of AI images in the public domain. The platforms have been taking examples from bad AI art, instead of the real thing, resulting in some awful results. After all, AI is only as good as the data it uses to power itself.
Of course, the purpose of this partnership is to enhance the performance of OpenAI. But fear not, Financial Times CEO John Ridding said in a statement that the Times is “committed to human journalism…”
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