This May we begin our monthly roundup of the latest and greatest social media news, trends and strategy ideas to help your business improve your marketing approach. Stay up-to-date and use this to improve your own marketing plans:

• Google integrating AI results - Samsung has changed its default search engine to Bing due to it using an AI-powered search. To compete Google has been trialling its own IA search features called Bard. They want to take this a step further with Magi but this is still in the trial stages.

• Meta has added new Instagram reel features - these changes make editing reels easier, you can also discover trending audio and hashtags on professional accounts, similar to TikTok. Meta’s Newsroom has more details about the announcement.

• Pinterest/ Amazon ad partnership - now when users see an Amazon ad on Pinterest it's a click-through to the product screen to complete their purchase. This makes Pinterest a more shoppable app. This is big news for brands, advertisers, and sellers who can use this to reach a new audience.

• Image & video priority in search engines - Microsoft, through search engines Bing and Edge Browser, are making images and video searches a priority. This means that marketers and advertisers with quality visual content will benefit from this change.

• Apple privacy ads feature - Apple has introduced ‘App Tracking Transparency’ which is a prompt that asks users if they want to receive targeted ads by having their data tracked.

• New TikTok ad - this new ad format allows advertisers to have full-screen video ads that appear when users open the app. It’s called ‘TopView’ and aims to be more engaging than usual TikTok ads.

These are just a few of the announcements that have happened in May. Let us know if there’s anything we missed that you feel deserves a mention!