Eleven Social Media Updates You Might Have Missed

April was a relatively mellow month in the social media world. Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube were the only networks that rolled out new updates.

Nevertheless, there were a few SEJ articles this month geared toward helping marketers make the most of their social media strategies.

For example, which brands are successfully tapping into the desires and needs of their target audience on social media?

Just over a year ago, Facebook released Reactions. Five new emojis joined the venerable Like button — Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, and Angry — with the aim of giving users a little more freedom to express their emotional responses to posts.

How are businesses using social listening today? To find out, research firm Clutch recently surveyed 300 marketers. Respondents all used social media monitoring tools for their jobs at medium and large B2B and B2C U.S. companies.

Finally, here are the exciting social media updates you may have missed in April.

Facebook

Facebook is testing its related articles feature to help users discover more stories about trending topics. Heading forward, Facebook will show you related stories before you click on an article.

Better video metrics are critical for marketers and businesses on Facebook, especially considering users are now watching more than 100 million hours of video every day. Here are the five changes to

Facebook video metrics that marketers need to know.

• New: Aggregate Minutes Viewed
• New: Video Metric Benchmarks
• Change: Aggregate Video Views
• Update: Date Range Analysis
• New: Sorting Options

People who read your Facebook Instant Articles will now be able to Like your page or sign up for your email newsletter from within your article. That’s because Facebook announced it has given all publishers access to two new call-to-action units: An Email Signup CTA and a Page Like CTA.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn launched Matched Audiences, which gives advertisers three new targeting tools: website re-targeting, account targeting, and contact targeting. Matched Audiences is now available for all of LinkedIn’s ad formats. This brings LinkedIn more in line with what Facebook (custom audiences) and

Twitter (tailored audiences) have offered to advertisers for years.

LinkedIn also launched Lead Gen Forms. This new feature in Sponsored Content campaigns removes a huge barrier on mobile devices: filling out forms. LinkedIn hopes conversation rates on mobile devices will rise with the new forms.

YouTube

YouTube significantly reduced the threshold that must be met for users to initiate live streams from their YouTube channels. When YouTube live streaming was first introduced back in February, channels had to have at least 10,000 subscribers to initiate a live stream. Now that threshold has been reduced to 1,000 subscribers.

Google is ramping up its efforts to ensure ads do not appear alongside questionable YouTube videos. Its latest measure involves blocking ads from appearing on channels with less than 10,000 total views.