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The week in social: YouTube Creator Studio, Messenger video chat, and travel ads

11 Mar 2018 Kevin Barnes

The week in social

Facebook Messenger Lite now has video chat

Facebook Messenger Lite is the company’s version of the standard Messenger product that lets users in locations with lower available bandwidth get access to a version of the app. While video chat has long been an available part of the standard version, this is the first time it’s coming to Lite. The latest version of Lite is currently available for Android devices and weighs in at under 10MB.

Twitter makes it easier to track mentions in group Direct Messages

As a way of helping users identify when they may need to jump in on a group Direct Message, Twitter will now send notifications to users when they are specifically ‘@’ mentioned. The feature is presently available on official Twitter apps but will be incoming to web and Lite versions, according to the company. The feature can be toggled in user settings.

More information on Twitter.

YouTube enhances the Creator Studio

In order to give creators more visibility on how their content is performing, YouTube has upgraded the Creators Studio that original started in beta to feature brand new analytics. Among the new stats included are Impressions, Impression Click-Through Rate, and Unique Viewers. An official post from YouTube goes on to define these metrics. For example, impressions are defined as a user seeing a thumbnail of creator’s video.

Instagram is working on a host of new features

Instagram is reportedly adding new features to its platform, a trend that it has taken on since the inception of the platform in order not only to keep, but to grow its massive user base. Among the new features in testing include a universal portrait mode, cinemagraphs, methods to organize conversations on the platform, and data download from Instagram’s servers. None of these have been commented on officially so it remains to be seen if they will make it into either preview or final versions of the app.

More information on The Next Web.

Facebook debuts a new ad format for travel brands

Facebook has built a new ad type for travel consideration called dynamic ads for travel, that allow advertisers to target users who have expressed intent in traveling or taken an action on the platform that indicates this, but are potentially very early on in the planning process. According to internal data, many millennial users get trip planning information from Facebook and Instagram, and using a combination of this and existing targeting features, the dynamic travel ads will help travel brands reach these users.