This curated list includes important updates and insights ( from IGTV and how digital ad landscape is getting prepared for transparency to Google AdWords becoming Google Ads) from the month of June. To stay updated on the latest updates from the digital landscape, read our Digital Marketing Apple Page.

Social Media 

• Instagram introduces @Mention Stories. Read the full announcement here 

Starting today, when someone mentions you in their story, you’ll be able to share that photo or video into your own story, Instagram said. 

• Snapchat rolls out 'Clear Chats' feature that lets users delete messages after they've been sent.
• Your Facebook Memories are now in one place. 

Your Memories page can include several sections:

On This Day: The content that you know and love will still be available within this section, showing your past posts and major life events from this date.
Friends Made On This Day: This section will include a list of friends you made on this date in the past, including special videos or collages that celebrate your friendversaries.
Recaps of Memories: This section will feature seasonal or monthly recaps of memories that have been bundled into a message or short video.
Memories You May Have Missed: If you haven’t checked your memories lately, this section will show you the posts that you might have missed from the past week.

Read the full announcement here 

• Twitter introduces Personalized News Features. Other updates include 

We’re also launching updates to search to make it simpler to find what you’re looking for. Starting today, at the top of search results, you’ll see related news, events, or stories and be able to tap in to get a recap and see the latest discussion, videos or scores.

We’re rolling out multiple timelines in some US Moments to help you see all the best Tweets surrounding a story: a recap timeline showing Tweets you may have missed, another showing the latest, as well as top commentary when it’s available. If there’s a live video, you’ll see it there, too. You may have already noticed these changes for some sports games, but now you’ll start to see them for more news and events as well.

Read the full announcement here

• Snapchat introduces a platform for third-party app developers, called Snap Kit. It will let other apps use Snapchat features, including stickers and Bitmoji.
• Facebook experiments with A/B Testing for page posts. Read the story here
• Instagram begins to expand shopping beyond Feed to Instagram Stories. Read the full story here
• Facebook launches a slew of updates to help creators connect with their fans through video 

[New today] Making Video More Interactive: We believe that watching video doesn’t have to be passive, and that many types of traditional entertainment formats — from game shows to reality TV to scripted content — can be reinvented to be community-centric. Today we’re sharing the next step for interactive video on Facebook. We’re announcing a set of new tools — polling for Live and on-demand video and gamification for Live — that will give creators the power to create fun, unique, and interactive content for their fans. Read more in our Media Blog post.
[New today] Bringing More Videos to Facebook Watch: When we launched Watch, we started with shows, and while they will continue to have a prominent place in Watch, we are now bringing videos from Pages into Watch as well. In our testing, we’ve found that people enjoy discovering and watching a combination of shows and videos in Watch — and for creators, this means their videos may be eligible to show up in Watch to be discovered by a broader audience.
Rolling Out Top Fans to More Creators: In March, we started a test that highlights a creator’s top fans by displaying a badge next to their names, enabling creators to easily identify and interact with their most loyal fans. Creators and fans loved the feature, so we are rolling it out more broadly.
 

Read the full story here

• Instagram launches IGTV, a new app for watching long-form, vertical video from your favorite Instagram creators.

IGTV is different in a few ways. First, it’s built for how you actually use your phone, so videos are full screen and vertical. Also, unlike on Instagram, videos aren’t limited to one minute. Instead, each video can be up to an hour long.

Read the full announcement here

• Facebook is testing the ability for users to cross-post single image Facebook updates to Instagram. Read more here
• Instagram Rolls Out Video Chat in Instagram Direct, Topic Channels on Explore, and New Camera Effects. Read about the updates here
• Facebook Stories adds Group Chat & Reactions. Read the update here
• Facebook designs Keyword Snooze that helps you control your News Feed. Read More

Digital Advertisement 

• Bing ads to allow advertisers to target LinkedIn audiences. This functionality would be unique to Bing Ads, as it’s something that Google AdWords doesn't offer.
• Google releases a new AdWords tool that will help advertisers create reports in spreadsheets. Read the full story here
• LinkedIn introduces Carousel Ads.

With LinkedIn carousel ads, you can:

Tell a complete brand story

In a single carousel ad, you can feature a swipeable series of up to 10 cards, and you can customize each card. With carousel ads, you can tell a deeper story, showcase multiple offerings at once, feature a single offering in depth, and share industry insights.

Command the attention of a professional audience

Because carousel ads are interactive and have eye-catching visuals, they stand out in the newsfeed. Your stories become tangible and encourage your audience to engage with your brand on both desktop and mobile.

Drive results for all your business goals

Carousel ads make every stage of the buyer’s journey count by adapting to your marketing objectives and allowing you to raise brand awareness and consideration, send traffic to multiple landing pages, or seamlessly generate quality leads with Lead Gen Forms.

Carousel for Sponsored Content is now available to all businesses.

Read the full announcement here

• Facebook can ban ads that lead to a bad shopping experience.

To find the tool, go to your Ads Activity tab. There you can view ads you’ve recently clicked, and hit the “Leave Feedback” button. This will prompt you to complete a brief questionnaire to tell us about your experience. We’ll use this tool to get feedback from the community to help better understand potentially low quality goods or services.

We share feedback directly with businesses that receive high volumes of negative feedback and give them a chance to improve before taking further action. We give them guidance on how to improve customer satisfaction and better meet customer expectations. This could mean setting clear expectations about shipping speed upfront or providing more transparency about return policies. If feedback does not improve over time, we will reduce the amount of ads that particular business can run. This can continue to the point of banning the advertiser. 

Read the full announcement here

• Twitter expands in-stream video ads to all advertisers via its self-serve ad tool. 
• Google expands affiliate location extensions to video campaigns on YouTube – on top of Search and Display campaign.

New local catalog ads on Display will also roll out to all advertisers by the end of the month to help shoppers discover what you sell, then visit your store...Onboarding to both local catalog ads and local inventory ads is now much easier for retailers of all sizes with the new local feed partnership program. 

Read the full announcement here

• Facebook adds new requirements for custom audience targeting. Read the full update here

• Google launches new Ad Settings, which makes it easier for users to understand and control how ads are tailored to them. The announcement read

Why this ad? is a feature that appears next to ads and both helps you learn why you are seeing a certain ad and gives you easy access to your Ad Settings. For example, if you want to know why you’re seeing an ad for a camera, Why this ad? might tell you it’s because you’ve searched for cameras, visited photography websites, or clicked on ads for cameras before

• Pinterest announces a new kind of Pinterest Marketing Partner that will make it easier and more efficient for brands to create great Pins.

Businesses can work with Popular Pays, QuickFrame, Shutterstock Custom, Social Native, Vidmob, Vidsy, and The Online Studio. These Creative PMPs have built solutions through the Pinterest API that will give brands access to creative development tools that make it easy to build, manage and launch engaging Pins. 

Read the full announcement here

• Advertisers of all sizes can run their own AR advertising campaign right from Snapchat’s self-serve tools. 

The initial launch of self-serve Lenses will allow for “Reach and Frequency” audience buys — an industry first for augmented reality. We’re also introducing a new Snap Ads “Lens attachment,” which lets viewers swipe up on a Snap Ad to unlock a Lens. Snap Ads with the Lens attachment are great for advertisers looking to reach Snapchatters more likely to engage with their ads.

Read the full announcement here

• Bing Ads enhancing the targeting settings experience and the dimensions tab. Read the full story here
• Facebook launches different updates to help creators make money

(New today) Announcing Brand Collabs Manager: We want to help creators be discovered by brands for new branded content collaborations. The Brand Collabs Manager lets brands search and find creators to potentially establish deals and partnerships with. We’ve been testing this with a limited set of partners, and will now be opening up more broadly. Learn more and express interest here.
Enabling Ad Breaks for More Creators: Today we’re starting to open up our Ad Breaks program to more creators in the US. We’ll be opening up in stages, starting with creators who are creating longer, original content that brings people back and fosters a loyal community.
Expanding Fan Subscriptions: We’ve been testing a way for fans to support creators they love by pledging $4.99 (USD) per month in exchange for perks like exclusive content and a special badge highlighting their status as a supporter, and we are now expanding to more creators.

• Facebook begins placing Autoplay Video Ads in Messenger. Read more
• Google AdWords is becoming Google Ads. Read the full announcement here
• Facebook takes significant steps to bring more transparency to ads and Pages on Facebook.

View Active Ads: You can now see the ads a Page is running across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and our partner network, even if those ads aren’t shown to you. Just log into Facebook, visit any Page and select “Info and Ads.” You’ll see ad creative and copy, and you can flag anything suspicious by clicking on “Report Ad.”
More Page Information: You can also learn more about Pages, even if they don’t advertise. For example, you can see any recent name changes and the date the Page was created. We’ll be adding more Page information in the coming weeks.

Read the full announcement here

• Twitter launches its Ads Transparency Center, where you can see ads bought by any account. 

Search 

• Two new Google Posts categories are available within Google My Business. 

We’ve added 2 new post types: product and offer post! Product and offer posts allow you to post your product and promotional details to your customers, Google said.

• Bing launches new intelligent Visual Search capabilities that let users search the web with the help of camera. 

For example, imagine you see a landmark or flower and want to learn more. Simply take a photo using one of the apps, or upload a picture from your camera roll. Bing will identify the object in question and give you more information by providing additional links to explore.

Read the full announcement here
 

• Google Search Console releases URL inspection tool which provides detailed crawl, index, and serving information about your pages, directly from the Google index.

More exciting updates
In addition to the launch of URL inspection, we have a few more features and reports we recently launched to the new Search Console:

Sixteen months of traffic data: The Search Analytics API now returns 16 months of data, just like the Performance report.
Recipe report: The Recipe report help you fix structured data issues affecting recipes rich results. Use our task-oriented interface to test and validate your fixes; we will keep you informed on your progress using messages.
New Search Appearance filters in Search Analytics: The performance report now gives you more visibility on new search appearance results, including Web Light and Google Play Instant results.

Read the full story here