It’s been another busy week in the world of Digital Marketing, with a relatively major announcement from Google potentially changing Search forever – certainly one which merits some of your consideration.
Otherwise it’s business as usual – Instagram provides some useful advice on content creation, X provides an (admittedly and, for once, potentially brilliant) platform update, while there’s plenty going on elsewhere. Let’s get to it!
How is Generative AI changing SEO?
This week heralded the launch from Google’s of AI-generated “AI Overviews” in search results. This could majorly impact SEO and referral traffic.
Generative AI is rapidly changing SEO on several fronts – in terms of content creation, in terms of how users consume content, and then in terms of how firms are now defining SEO strategies.
The challenge is that with Google favouring quality content and supposedly down-weighting AI-generated articles, it isn’t quite as simple as saying “Hey ChatGPT, can you please write 100 articles about cake for my website”, publishing and hoping for the best. Instead, in order to best harness AI tools, you need to become a prompt master and then still apply that extra 20% of editorial insight to ensure that what you’re publishing is actually relevant and useful to your audience.
These summaries, powered by Gemini AI, aim to directly answer queries in the search results page, reducing the need for users to click through to websites. This shift may particularly affect sites optimized for informational content like Wikipedia, as users can get answers directly from search results.
Google suggests that these AI Overviews could lead to increased diversity in site visits for more complex queries, potentially offsetting some negative impacts on traffic. This development will likely necessitate new SEO strategies as the dynamics of search change.
The good news is that if you get the first bit right (i.e. write good, relevant and well-presented content), you’ll then be well prepared for this. Social Media Today took a deeper look which inspired this musing. Bloomberg has also shared some interesting thoughts.
X will soon enable advertisers to create audiences with AI
X has announced that advertisers will soon be able to create advertising audiences via AI prompts. This is actually the neatest idea I’ve heard from X (or Twitter) in literally years.
This article includes an example showing that you’ll soon be able to describe the target audience you have in mind, such as “users who are leaders in technology,” and X’s AI matching system will then provide you with an appropriate audience based on that description.
I am fascinated to see how this actually works, as there is often a lot of nuance and curation to this type of audience creation that a prompt such as this simply doesn’t cover. But it would be a great way to build a first draft, or even answer a quick question from a stakeholder.
Instagram says longer reels can hurt performance
After years of driving people to post more and seemingly longer videos, Instagram now tells us that this might actually be harmful for performance.
The key headline here is that Reels which are longer than 90 seconds can hurt distribution.
It’s relatively unlikely if you’re reading this that you even post Reels that long on a frequent basis, but good to know moving forwards; don’t do it.
Further Reading
Google also introduced a ‘web filter’ this week, to near-universal acclaim. In short, this is a way to filter results to more meaningful and useful content.
OpenAI launched Chat GPT 4o this week, a new version that inputs and outputs in voice, images and text.
In this week’s edition of “Remember that?”, Meta is shutting down Workplace. No, really, it was still going.
TikTok, or specifically BookTok, is driving a book buying renaissance. Remarkable to see us going full circle and social driving offline economies in this way.
And finally, Zuck celebrated his 40th birthday with a nostalgic recreation of locations important to him and his formative years. Imagine the expectation you’d have of being on that guest list and how wild a night it would be, only to find out you’d be spending the night in a recreated office. It’s a genuinely sweet gesture but not what we’re about here at Digital Marketing in 3 Minutes.
That’s it for another week – if you found this interesting then I would really appreciate if you shared this with your friends and colleagues.
If you’re feeling particularly generous, then I won’t stop you from buying me a coffee. Have a great weekend and I’ll see you next week!