So-Called Social: Week of September 17

Your weekly dose of social news.

It’s officially summer in San Francisco — which means everyone in the city will be complaining about how hot their apartment is. Get ready. Wherever you are in the world, here’s what happened on social this week.

Social nets update stuff

Instagram DM is getting a bit of an upgrade with the addition of GIFs. Now you can DM with your besties without typing a word. With the platform’s partnership with Giphy, you don’t even have to leave the app as GIFs go directly through DM.

LinkedIn just released Dynamic Ads in Campaign Manager, the company’s newly revised ad management tool. Essentially, businesses running the Dynamic Ads native ad format can create, manage, and track campaigns while customizing the message to the audience with publicly available info from LinkedIn member profiles. Pretty sweet.

Welp, I guess we really are all going vertical. YouTube is officially embracing vertical video ads to let brands provide a better mobile experience. Advertisers can now snap up slots that fill up a user’s screen when they’re viewing content on YouTube’s mobile app — much like the ads served up by Insta and Snapchat.

Twitter appears to be refocusing a bit on live broadcasts (again). The platform is now putting livestreams and broadcasts started by accounts you follow at the top of your timeline. This new feature will also include breaking news, personalities, and sports.

Adobe does stuff

This week on Instagram, Creative Cloud launched their first piece of IGTV content, an inspiring Lightroom Mobile tutorial from influencer @tifforelie. They also shared the first video in a new mini-series of tips and tricks for Adobe XD from evangelist Howard Pinsky.

Other brands do stuff

I’m obsessed with this Ad Council campaign titled “She Can STEM.” It’s focused on inspiring young girls to get into STEM by introducing several successful STEM executives discussing their backgrounds and what opportunities there are in the field. The “She Can STEM” campaign was put together by the Advertising Council in collaboration with General Electric, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Verizon. And MTV, through a partnership with Facebook Anthology, will introduce a weekly video series on IGTV.

Interesting stuff

Despite still having some work to do to become the television-esque video platform that its name implies, IGTV seems to actually be a thing. And episodic videos are emerging as a popular kind of content on IGTV — which is important if the platform wants to compete with YouTube and Facebook Watch.

Sounds like Facebook is hoping to prove augmented reality (AR) is more than just selfie filters and games. But… according to this journalist, its version of AR ads might not be any less gimmicky. From News Feed ads, to its own AR hardware, to working with movie studios to create AR experiences around film, it sure looks like FB is positioning itself for something big.

Fun stuff

Everyone in San Francisco this weekend.

Jack Black and Jimmy Fallon act out delightfully absurd plays written by kids (and it’s wonderful).

This comedian’s Emmys troll is my favorite.

Dogs can lunge, too. Sorta.