The Friday Five: 4-Day Week Being Trialled, Huge New LinkedIn Study, and IG Let Posts Be Pinned

Hello all, welcome back to The Friday Five!

You know the deal by now, we give you five of the best marketing and SEO news stories from the last week in an easily digestible newsletter. We're like a marketing multi-vitamin!

Before we get stuck in, we just wanted to let you know that episode five of our fantastic podcast, Never Mind the Keywords, is out now! In this ep, Megan and Nafisah chatted to motivational speaker and author Jack Nolan. It's a truly inspirational episode because Jack is a pretty inspirational person, you can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify today!

Now, without further ado - let's get into The Friday Five!

1. Let’s Put a Pin in That: IG Letting Users Pin Up to Three Posts on Their Profile

As the title suggests, Instagram has rolled out a new feature on their platform that allows users to pin their three favourite posts to the top of their profile.

This new feature will surely be welcomed by the frequent IG users who want to showcase posts that they are proud of but that may have gotten buried at the bottom of the feed by newer posts.

To pin a post or reel, select a specific photo, click the three dots in the top right corner and near the bottom of that list you'll see 'Pin this post' - it's that easy.

It's a great idea, and a feature that will be used we're sure but, and call us cynical, we can't help thinking it's yet another step by a giant social media company to try and emulate that social media app.

Tech Crunch goes into detail in their blog.

2. Google Sheets Getting an SEO Glow-up Thanks to a New Add On

Any SEO knows how much of a faff it can be to do bits and bobs of keyword research and analysis, before having to paste it into Google Sheets. Admittedly it's not the most pressing issue of the day but it can be annoying.

Anyway, Andrew Charlton is here with a solution. He has built a Google Sheets add on that lets you do a good chunk of SEO work within Sheets. Clever right? No more downloading CSV files and pasting them in a clunky fashion (let's be honest, it never pastes in quite the way you want it), simply download the add on for a minimum price of $30 (about ￡24) and enjoy being able to fine search volumes, related keywords, competitor keywords, and search results.

Purchase it here!

3. Google Ads Flexing Its Creative Muscles with New Beta Feature

Rumours circling in the Google Ads community about a new Beta asset creation feature appear to have been confirmed in recent days. "Automatically Created Assets" (catchy, right?), allows Ads users to let Google generate headlines, descriptions and even creative assets based on the landing page, their domain, and previously published ads.

Here's how Google describes it : "Automatically created assets are a campaign-level setting that helps you generate additional assets to complement the assets you input for your ads by using relevant creative content from your landing page, website, existing ads, and keywords in your ad group."

The uptake of these kinds of automated services may be slow to start with, especially with people who are creating ads on behalf of clients. These sorts of AI programmes aren't perfect and can be liable to make mistakes which may see people trust their own creative capabilities, even if Automatically Created Assets is an easier option.

SEO Round Table talk more about it in their blog.

4. New LinkedIn Study: 141,000 Posts Analysed, and the Most Effective Type of Post Was...

LinkedIn really is the It Girl right now and is enjoying record levels of engagement from brands and people looking to grow their network.

This engagement has seen plenty of people ask questions such as:

• When is the best time to post?
• How much time should I invest in the platform?
• What type of post will get me the most engagement?

It's the latter question that a new report by SocialInsider and Cloud Campaign has looked to answer. They looked at 141,000 posts from 1,000 companies and came to a bunch of different conclusions, with the main one being this:

Native documents generate 3x more clicks than any other type of content

Interesting right? Not something this writer expected to be the main takeaway from the report. To read Social Media Today's article on it and check out the full report head over to their article.

5. Biggest Trial of Four Day Week Begins in the UK

On Monday (6th June), the UK underwent the biggest four-day working week trial with 3300 employees from 70 companies trialling a 100:80:100 working pattern where they receive 100% of their pay for 80% of their time, in return for 100% productivity.

The 70 companies span over 30 industries and it will be fascinating to see what the results of this 6-month trial are. The lead researcher on the pilot scheme, Juliet Schor, said this about a 4-day week: “The four-day week is generally considered to be a triple-dividend policy – helping employees, companies, and the climate. Our research efforts will be digging into all of this.”

The study is being carried out by 4 Day Week Global in partnerships with Oxford and Cambridge universities, Boston College, and the think tank Autonomy.

Read more on this groundbreaking trial here.

There we have it, another Friday Five. What do you think of this 4-day working week trial? Will you be uploading more 'native documents' to LinkedIn and using the new Google Sheets plug in? Let us know in the comments section!