The week in social: Facebook Local, LinkedIn Leads, and Snapchat advertising

Facebook re-brands its events-based app

The standalone Facebook app for events has been re-branded this past week as Facebook local, meant to help users discover interesting places and things happening either around them, or places that they are traveling to. The application allows the users to search for different categories including restaurants, friends’ activity, attractions, drinks, and more. The application is available on Android and iOS, but only within the United States.

Read more on Facebook.

LinkedIn introduces new ways to generate leads

With a bigger focus on helping marketers get more out of the platform, LinkedIn has introduced new features to help generate leads. The first of these is Lead Gen Forms for Sponsored InMail, which lets the marketer put a form-fill straight within the message, shortening the user journey for the recipient so they don’t have to go to a separate website. The second method is a personalized dynamic ad, which will send messages through ads to consumers that allow for actions such as downloading whitepapers, while also capturing key information about the target.

More information on LinkedIn Blog.

Snapchat improves advertising capabilities for Lenses and Filters

In an effort to attract more advertisers to the platform amid troublesome recent earnings reports, Snapchat now allows advertisers to place links in sponsored Filters and Lenses. This allows a specific call to action for these advertising units now, and will likely allow advertisers to track more direct interest from potential consumers. The addition of links is referred to as context cards, and the metrics that can be tracked are impressions, clicks and click-through rate.

More information on AdWeek.

Artist information on tours now available on YouTube videos

As a way to help artists monetize consumption of music videos on the platform, YouTube has partnered with Ticketmaster to show tour dates for artists whose music videos are playing. This way if a user watches a music video and enjoys it, there may be an opportunity for them to purchase tickets to a future show. Presently the deal works for artists who have Ticketmaster shows in North America only but YouTube plans to roll this out much more widely.

More information on YouTube Blog.

Pinterest improves its visual search features for users

Pinterest introduced two new features this past week in an official blog post focused on visual search. The first of these is called Lens Your Look, which lets users take a photo of a particular item in their wardrobe and find other matching items for it right on Pinterest. The second is a further integration with ShopStyle, which will bring 5 million additional shoppable items onto the Pinterest platform for users to search through. The items are spread out across 25 different brands to bring more variety to the shopping experience.

More information on Pinterest Blog.

Facebook centralizes its Stories product

Earlier this week, Facebook Messenger Day and Facebook stories were combined into Stories to make the brand and product itself more seamless. Whenever a user creates a story now on either platform, it will appear on Facebook and Messenger without having to cross-post. This has likely been done in an effort to combat they low usage of Facebook Stories, especially in comparison to its popular related service Instagram.

Read more on Facebook.