Group items tagged

The company, part of Google, says it's expanding its Custom Affinity Audience offering so advertisers can target users who search for ski resorts on Google Maps or download a ski resort app, for example, and serve them with ads for winter-related gear. It also provides targeting based on real-life locations that users may have visited.

Meanwhile, YouTube says its new Director Mix software can create hundreds or thousands of different video from a single asset.

Marketers who leverage Director Mix must provide YouTube with all the building blocks of video, including voiceovers, background and copy. YouTube says it will then create "hundreds or thousands of versions to match your audience segments."

The company is relaunching Groups by rolling it into its main app by the end of the month after quietly pulling the standalone app earlier this year, and it will be streamlining the service by cutting out several features, including an ability for Group administrators to pre-moderate comments; and a way to email send Group posts as emails to the whole group, while also adding in new features like threaded replies and the ability to post video and other media.

Almost exactly a year ago, Facebook announced that it too was killing off its Groups app so that it could integrate the feature closer with the core app experience. In both the case of LinkedIn and Facebook, the idea is somewhat the same: while we have our wider networks of friends and Pages that we follow on both platforms, sometimes there is value in communities that are focused around more specific interests, and ultimately, that might turn out to be the lever that brings more people in and out of using the main service.

conversations taking place in Groups will now appear in-stream on the LinkedIn feed, rather than in a separate tab. When group members are replying to posts, there will now be threaded replies, which will let people respond directly to comments within the thread.