Since it started testing a new fullscreen redesign, Instagram has come under heavy criticism from users – including high-profile figures like the Kardashians

Now, in a recent video, Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri seems to agree that the new design is not delivering the quality experience the company had hoped for.

In the video shared on Twitter, Mosseri explained the redesign is “not yet good” and that the new layout will likely see some revisions before it becomes the default for all users. 

However, Mosseri also emphasized that the platform will not be backing away from its current direction. Recommended posts and a new emphasis on video are going to be major parts of the final redesign despite the public demand to “make Instagram Instagram again.”

More Changes Are Likely

The ongoing test has made quite a splash, but it is actually only being shown to a relatively small number of users.  While it captures what Instagram is trying to achieve, it is not up to the standards of the company.

“It’s a test to a few percentage of people out there, and the idea is that a more full-screen experience, not only for videos but for photos, might be a more fun and engaging experience. But I also want to be clear. It’s not yet good, and we’re going to have to get it to a good place if we’re going to ship to the rest of the Instagram community.”

Photos Aren’t Going Anywhere

Much of the anger about the new layout comes from the opinion that Instagram is becoming too much like TikTok by prioritizing video content. 

Though Mosseri emphasizes the platform is always going to be a photo-sharing app at its core, it also needs to grow and expand.

“I want to be clear — we’re going to continue to support photos. It’s part of our heritage. I love photos and I know a lot of you out there love photos too. That said, I need to be honest, I do believe that more and more of Instagram is going to become video over time. We see this even if we change nothing.

We see this even if you just look at chronological feed. If you look at what people share on Instagram that’s shifting more and more to videos over time. If you look at what people like and consume and view on Instagram, that’s also shifting more and more to video over time even when we stop changing anything. So we’re going to have to lean into that shift while continuing to support photos.”

Recommended Posts Are Staying In Your Feed

Another major complaint from users revolves around the inclusion of recommended content in the main feed. 

Recommended posts show content from other users you don’t currently follow. The inclusion of this type of content upset many users who found the recommended content irrelevant or poor-quality. 

Though these recommended posts are going to be sticking around, Mosseri said it is a work in progress and offered tips on how to improve the quality of recommendations:

“Recommendations are posts in your feed from accounts that you do not follow. The idea is to help you discover new and interesting things on Instagram that you might not know even exist. “It’s a test to a few percentages of people out there.”

Now, if you’re seeing things in your feed that are recommendations that you’re not interested in, that means we’re doing a bad job ranking, and we need to improve. And you can X out a recommendation, you can even snooze all recommendations for up to a month or go to your ‘following’ feed.

But we’re going to continue to try to get better at recommendations because we think it’s one of the most effective and important ways to help creators reach more people. We want to do our best by creators, particularly small creators, and we see recommendations as one of the best ways to reach a new audience and grow their following.”

Facebook’s revamped home feed is finally here after weeks of rumors and leaks.

The new home feed was announced by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the social network and explained in further detail in a Facebook Newsroom post over the weekend.

The big revamp is made up of two changes to users’ feeds which aim to bridge the gap between what people have come to expect from Facebook and the video-heavy experience made popular by TikTok.

These changes are:

  • The Home tab will act as a “discovery engine” through personalized content recommendations, including an increased focus on Reels and Stories.
  • A new Feeds tab will showcase content from specific types of sources, including friends, groups, and Pages. This content will be in reverse-chronological order.

As Zuckerberg said in his announcement:

“One of the most requested features for Facebook is to make sure people don’t miss friends’ posts. So today we’re launching a Feeds tab where you can see posts from your friends, groups, Pages and more separately in chronological order. The app will still open to a personalized feed on the Home tab, where our discovery engine will recommend the content we think you’ll care most about. But the Feeds tab will give you a way to customize and control your experience further.”

Does This Affect Your Ads?

According to the information available, advertisers should be largely unaffected by the revamped home feed for now. Facebook ads will continue to appear in all feeds. It is, however, unclear how engagement might differ between these feeds and how this might influence future ad updates.

Instagram is making it easier to find nearby businesses and places using its interactive maps.

The feature was revealed by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a post showcasing the new maps features:

In the past. Instagram’s maps were limited to strictly showing popular posts from users nearby. With this new update though, users can search or filter the maps to find local businesses similar to how Google Maps lets users search for local businesses.

What sets Instagram’s map features apart is how they function. 

Firstly, only businesses with a professional Instagram account are eligible to be included in Instagram’s maps, unlike the automatically populated maps found on Google.

Secondly, the feature is still focused on the social experience. Rather than giving users a wealth of contact information like Google Maps or Google Business Profiles, when users tap on a business they are given the option to visit the associated page. save the company’s page for later or immediately start following the brand’s Instagram account. 

Why Is Instagram Getting Into Local Search?

It might seem odd for a social network to be essentially establishing a local search engine, but trends indicate many are already using social media for this purpose. In fact, just recently Google Senior Vice President Prabhakar Raghavan addressed this exact trend at a conference, saying:

“In our studies, something like almost 40% of young people, when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search. They go to TikTok or Instagram.”

With this in mind, it is clear Instagram is simply making it easier for users to do this with the introduction of its new map features.

Instagram is launching a new feature called “Payments in Chat”, though the name undersells the actual capabilities of the feature.

As announced via Meta’s Newsroom, the Payments in Chat feature will allow online businesses to collect payments directly from customers through the chat tool. But, more than that, the tool will enable companies to completely handle the sales process through chat – including answering customers’ questions, creating new purchase orders, managing payments, and even tracking product shipments.

As the announcement explains:

“We want to help people start conversations with businesses they care about and help them find and buy products they love in an easy, seamless experience, right from the chat thread.”

How It Works

To make Payments in Chat possible, the new feature uses Meta Pay – the company’s first-party payment processing service. This keeps the process streamlined, allowing shoppers to make purchases in just a few taps while providing secure data transmission and purchase protection.

Using this service, customers are able to initiate a chat with a company representative to ask questions about a potential purchase, checkout, pay for the purchase, and track its shipment to your home without ever leaving Instagram’s chat.

When combined with Instagram Shops, the new Payment in Chat feature makes it possible for shoppers to go from discovering a new product to buying it with just a few taps or without the need to ever leave the platform.

Google My Business is officially gone as the GMB mobile app has finally stopped functioning.

Now, instead of being able to edit your local listing, see your insights, or respond to customers, business operators will only see a short message reading “the Google My Business app is no longer available” if you open the app.

Google My Business shutdown notice

Of course, the shutdown of the GMB app is not sudden. The company announced it would be discontinuing the app when it revealed it was rebranding local business listings to Google Business Profiles.

Thankfully, you do have other options if you have still been using the GMB app to manage your listing. 

Along with being able to update your listing through Google Search, you can also manage your listing through the Google Maps app. 

With this, Google has finally eliminated the final remaining artifact from Google My Business in favor of allowing businesses to manage their listings directly within Google Search and the existing Google Maps app for a more seamless experience. Though not explicitly stated, the goal seems to be simplifying managing your local SEO without the need for an entirely separate platform like GMB.

Pinterest is angling to make itself the leading social network for e-commerce activity with a slew of new features and advancements for shopping. 

As the announcement for the updates explains, Pinterest has seen a surge in the number of merchants listing their products on the platform (up 87% in Q1 of 2022 alone).

Now, the company is hoping to double down on this with a new Pinterest API for Shopping, Product Tagging for Pins, Videos in Shopping Catalogs, and the introduction of a Shop Tab on Business Profiles:

“At Pinterest, our goal is to turn inspiration into action, and our vision for shopping is to make it possible to buy anything Pinners are inspired by on the platform. In 2021, the number of Pinners engaging with shopping surfaces on Pinterest grew over 215%, and 89% of weekly Pinners use Pinterest for inspiration in their path to purchase. The new shopping features such as the API for Shopping allows brands and retailers to reach high-intent Pinners during the earliest stage of their shopping journey with the most updated catalog data.”

Pinterest API for Shopping

Pinterest wants to make it easy to manage your products no matter how large your inventory is. With the new API for Shopping, you can more accurately manage metadata for your products with early tests showing the tool was 97% accurate.

Product Tagging for Pins

Though the social network is leaning more heavily into the world of shopping, the main focus is still on Pins that users and brands share. With Product Tagging, you can make your pins a seamless part of your sales process. Once you have tagged your products in pins, shoppers can easily click on the tags to be immediately taken to a sales page.

Video in Catalog

The typically image-based social network is gradually integrating video. The latest move in this direction is the ability to use video assets in product catalogs to showcase your products in motion.

Shop Tab on Business Profiles

Make your online store a more prominent part of your business profile with a new tab dedicated to your shop. According to early tests, approximately 30% of Shopify merchants said they got their first attributed checkout directly from this high-intent shopping feature.

In an update to the help documentation for Googlebot, the search engine’s crawling tool, Google explained it will only crawl the first 15 MB of any webpage. Anything after this initial 15 MBs will not influence your webpage’s rankings.

As the Googlebot help document states:

“After the first 15 MB of the file, Googlebot stops crawling and only considers the first 15 MB of the file for indexing.

The file size limit is applied on the uncompressed data.”

Though this may initially raise concerns since images and videos can easily exceed these sizes, the help document makes clear that media or other resources are typically exempt from this Googlebot limit:

“Any resources referenced in the HTML such as images, videos, CSS, and JavaScript are fetched separately.”

What This Means For Your Website

If you’ve been following the most commonly used best practices for web design and content management, this should leave your website largely unaffected. Specifically, the best practices you should be following include:

  • Keeping the most relevant SEO-related information relatively close to the start of any HTML file. 
  • Compressing images.
  • Leaving images or videos unencoded into the HTML when possible.
  • Keeping HTML files small – typically less than 100 KB.