In this week's 'Skim: Apple launches a Snapchat-inspired video editing app; LinkedIn announces big news for its Sales Navigator, adds new retargeting tools; Foursquare plots to take over the world; YouTube phases out annotations; Instagram has a surprising influence on older users; and much more...

Skim for this week's roundup!

1. Apple unveils video creation and sharing app

Apple might not be ready to take a full leap into social media, but what it unveiled last week could be called baby steps. The technology giant introduced Clips, a new, social-media-inspired video, photo, and music editing app on iOS that shares quickly and easily across social networks.

Why social-media-inspired? Users will be able to add filters, speech bubbles, shapes, emoji, and even "full-screen posters with animated background and customizable text." Apple's also added what it calls "Live Titles," animated captions and titles based on what users say.

There will be a music library of tracks for users to choose to set their clips to, and the app will automatically suggest tags of people who are in your contacts or have been previously identified within your iOS Photos app. Clips will launch in April.

2. LinkedIn buffs up its lead generation tool, Sales Navigator

Finding leads on LinkedIn just got a bit easier for brands, with the social network announcing a new Enteprise Edition of its Sales Navigator, its lead-generation solution. The improvements include new customer relationship management integrations, with widgets for quick profile viewing shared within CRMs such as Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics.

For companies already using the Professional or Team editions of Sales Navigator, a LinkedIn spokesperson described the new Enterprise Edition as one for high-functioning sales organizations, as it now includes up to 50 InMails per month and TeamLink Extend, which lets anyone in your company opt in to share his/her LinkedIn network with TeamLink so that all employees can reach out to one another for introductions to prospects, even if the employees are not directly connected.

3. Others are trying, but Facebook is dominating social video

Gary Vaynerchuk said its video feature is a brand's best friend, and now anew report from social analytics company Quintly shows that Facebook not only dominates video for marketing campaigns but also exemplifies the trend of siloed content's becoming a thing of the past as social networks continue to integrate features copied from one another.

Among the brands studied that use video in their Facebook campaigns, 90% used native Facebook videos, whereas just 30% and 2% used YouTube and Vimeo, respectively. Facebook native videos—those uploaded directly to the platform—also garnered 186% more engagement than other formats, and they were shared 4.6 times more than others.

4. Foursquare is quietly plotting its takeover of the world

You might think of Foursquare as long gone from the social media space, but the company has other ideas. It recently announced Foursquare Analytics and, in the process, continued its transformation from a social media company to a location-data powerhouse.

Foursquare Analytics is essentially a dashboard of insights that lets companies see how they're performing based on measurable, real-world visits. With 50 million monthly users around the globe, and 92% of consumer spending still taking place in the physical world, Foursquare argues the real world lacks features like cookies that make digital work and the company's no-hardware-needed setup means brands can begin providing timely offers to consumers in new ways.


Foursquare Analytics from Foursquare on Vimeo.

5. LinkedIn to boost advertising using email addresses and website visits

Although it won't be rolled out until November, we've got word of a new LinkedIn ad targeting program that will bring the professional social network more in step with other platforms' modern advertising businesses.

LinkedIn will bring back the ability for marketers to retarget consumers who have visited their websites with ads on LinkedIn, as well as let them target consumers based on email addresses. These techniques are already employed by rivals including Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Pinterest, and will be a part of LinkedIn's new "Matched Audiences" program.

6. Older users most influenced by Instagram ads

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#SocialSkim: Apple Takes On Snapchat, LinkedIn Beefs Up Lead Generation: 11 Stories This Week

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Christian Neri

Christian Neri is a digital marketing professional in the film & television industry, and a contributor to MarketingProfs. An American expat in Paris, he recently completed his MS in digital marketing at IÉSEG School of Management.

Instagram: @christianneri

Twitter: @christianneri