Good afternoon, and welcome to the last roundup of November!
This week’s stories cover how Elon Musk recruited a long-time critic of his to fix Twitter Search, how TikTok are helping out small businesses yet again, and Google’s guide to ranking updates vs ranking systems.
Elon Musk Hires A Prolific Hacker To Fix Twitter Search
Twitter’s current CEO Elon Musk has set their eyes on enhancing Twitter’s search bar. This week, he recruited George Hotz, a long-time critic of Musk who also serves as a hacker.
During a 12-week internship, Hotz will aim to “fix” Twitter Search and include new features. One such promised feature is being able to search within liked tweets.
Hotz was the first person ever to jailbreak an iPhone, so they have the background of bringing new features to an existing product or platform.
What’s ironic is that Hotz was actually a long-time critic of Musk, proclaiming that he could develop a better system for self-driving cars than Tesla can.
Hotz reached out to Musk on Twitter and volunteered for an internship, at the expense of the company covering the costs of living in San Francisco. From the tweet chain, it seems like Musk has agreed to these terms.
As of now, Hotz is tweeting his journey of how he’s improving search and adding common features which have been requested from users for a long time.
Which new features though?
One long-requested feature is actually just the search delivering relevant results based on a broad match of words rather than exact words.
As well as this, Hotz is trying to source ideas from users for how to deliver contextual autocomplete results when a user types “from:” into Twitter search.
Another change Hotz wants to make is removing the annoying sign-up/in prompt that appears after scrolling through Twitter if you aren’t logged in.
After removing the prompt, Hotz plans to implement searching within liked tweets.
Beyond the above changes, it’s unclear how Hotz will “fix” Twitter search. However, if they’re documenting the journey through tweets, it’s likely it will become clear as time goes on.
A New Tool To Gain Audience Insight From TikTok
TikTok has rolled out a new business tool which lets a business gain insight into its audiences, with the intent of helping to plan organic and paid content.
The tool can be found in TikTok Ads Manager, however, it’s free to use and you don’t need to have paid for an ad to use it.
The insight can help to plan organic and paid content due to the data that’s available because it’s based on users from across all of TikTok. The data will let you see user behaviours, interests, and demographics.
You can also see which hashtags are popular with your audience so you can incorporate them to boost engagement.
Filters allow you to define your own audience or filter information as well.
Here’s some more info about the data from TikTok Audience Insights.
TikTok Audience Insights
Audience Insights is available to use through the TikTok Ads Manager, and delivers aggregated information from users who have been active in the last 30 days.
To access the tool:
- Login to Ads Manager
- Select “Reporting” from the top navigation bar.
- Click “Audience Insights”
Defining An Audience
By using the menu on the left, you can define your audience by using custom filters or segments such as:
- Locations
- Languages
- Demographics
- Interests & Behaviors – includes the optional sub-filters:
- Ad Interest Categories
- Video Interactions
- Creator Interactions:
- Hashtag Interactions
- Devices
Audience Overview
After defining an audience, you’ll see the audience overview tab:
The Audience Overview tab shows you easily readable graphs and charts displaying the following data for your audience:
- Age
- Gender
- Country
- State
- Device OS
- Device Prices (USD): Device price is only available in USD.
- Top 10 interests
- Bottom 10 interests
Audience Interests
There’s also a tab which shows your audience’s interests to see what type of content they engage with:
You can see the top ten hashtags a user engages with, and the ad categories they engage with.
You can also export the data to an Excel spreadsheet with the “Export All” button in the top right-hand corner.
TikTok is currently releasing quite a lot of tools and resources for small businesses, which advertisers and marketers are appreciating.
Google’s Guide To Ranking Systems
Google has published a new guide to the current ranking systems the company use for websites and content, and the ranking systems they’ve sunsetted in the past.
The aim is to keep SEO’ers and marketers informed about terminology, ranking systems compared to ranking updates, and which ones are current or retired.
A ranking system constantly runs in the background, but an update is a one-time change to a system.
For instance, the product review system constantly runs in the background when Google delivers you a search result based on product reviews, but updates help to improve it.
Here’s more about the Google guide to ranking systems.
The Current Ranking Systems
Here are the current ranking systems Google use:
- BERT
- Crisis information systems
- Deduplication systems
- Exact match domain system
- Freshness systems
- Helpful content system
- Link analysis systems and PageRank
- Local news systems
- MUM
- Neural matching
- Original content systems
- Removal-based demotion systems
- Page experience system
- Passage ranking system
- Product reviews system
- RankBrain
- Reliable information systems
- Site diversity system
- Spam detection systems
Sunsetted Google Ranking Systems
The ranking systems that Google don’t use anymore are:
- Hummingbird
- Mobile-Friendly ranking system
- Page speed system
- Panda system
- Penguin system
- Secure sites system
If you want to learn more information about the above ranking systems, Google’s guide explains each one in detail.
As always, thank you for reading this week’s digital roundup!
Sean Walsh
Sean is a Director at Intelligency heading up our digital marketing and client services operations. Sean has 15+ years experiencing working both in-house and agency with brands including Lloyds, Alstom, Hitachi, Lufthansa, Viaplay, DFDS Seaways and Mercedes-Benz.
