Facebook

Facebook recently hit the 1 billion monthly active user mark, and now the company has another major milestone to celebrate: 1 million active advertisers. The active part of that is key, as it means 1 million companies, brands and other people have purchased a Facebook ad in the past 28 days. Facebook’s Director of Small Business, Dan Levy, blogged about the company’s newest milestone: Over the past year I’ve had the privilege of meeting and learning from many amazing business owners who use Facebook. Some have just set up their Facebook Pages while others are experts who share their tips with others. I’ve learned from companies like Ministry of Retail in Singapore, Springwools in Ireland, and Scene75 Entertainment Center in Ohio…and many more around the world. I know business owners like these invest their hard earned money and time into running their companies. So today, on behalf of everyone at Facebook, I want to say thank you to them and to the over one million businesses like them who are active advertisers. You have chosen Facebook as a partner to grow your business. We appreciate the chance to work with you, and we celebrate your success. Facebook also launched a site for small business owners to share their success stories. The site also shared some statistics about how prevalent small businesses are on Facebook: There are more than 2 billion connections between local businesses and people. In an average week, there are more than 645 million views of, and 13 million comments on, local business Facebook pages. Roughly 70 percent of monthly active users in the U.S. and Canada are connected to a local business on Facebook. With these statistics in mind, it’s easy to see why Facebook recently simplified its advertising offerings, as a major part (in terms of quantity) of their ad base isn’t the Fortune 500 companies — but smaller businesses who just want to figure out how to achieve their goals. Readers: If you manage a page for a small business, what works and what doesn’t work for you on Facebook? Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Facebook has been pushing for users to add more content to their timelines, indicating shows they’ve watched, movies they’ve seen, and books they’ve read. This information is then added to modules on the left side of the timeline. Now, the site wants to know how well users liked those things. Some users started seeing prompts on the sidebar of their  to rate these items on a star scale. This appears to be a way to push more recommendations into the system. So when users type in Graph Search queries such as “books my friends have read,” or “movies my friends like,” a star rating could someday show up to these results, similar to what a user sees when they type in restaurant-related queries. Readers: Have you seen this prompt?

Mass Relevance Social curation and engagement platform Mass Relevance and marketing communications organization VivaKi announced a strategic partnership on Monday. The partnership will give all agencies with Publicis Groupe, which founded VivaKi in 2008, access to the Mass Relevance platform. The Mass Relevance platform can aggregate, filter and display posts from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+ and YouTube in real time. Publicis Groupe is currently one of the third largest buyers in the world for social advertising. The organization’s adoption of the Mass Relevance platform will give it a significant boost. The Mass Relevance platform has already powered social experiences for the the 2012 elections with CNN and Facebook; the Olympic Games with NBC and Twitter; as well as campaigns for brands like Pepsi and Doritos. Unified Enterprise marketing technology company Unified has announced the quarterly release of its cloud-based Social Operating Platform. In its spring 2013 release, the company has added more data-driven applications for more thorough insights. These applications include an insights application for tracking audience and engagement analytics as well as a content application for real-time feed optimization and monitoring. The company has also added an advertising application for cross-channel planning and buying. With these new applications, Unified adds to its existing capabilities such as automated ad creation, targeting, optimization, and programmatic bid management for native, mobile and premium Facebook ads.

Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer and Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman disclosed their Facebook stock transactions in Form 4 filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission Tuesday. continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Facebook has apparently hit pause on rumored auto-play video ads in the News Feed. Reports from December suggested that sometime this spring, Facebook would start selling video advertisements in its marquee space, but a story in Ad Age notes that Facebook will likely delay this product until the Fall. Users were understandably enraged upon learning that Facebook might adopt this controversial ad unit. It was reported back in December that the company was still debating whether or not to have the sound automatically play with the video, which would probably lead to fewer time spent on News Feed. However, it could be a huge boom for Facebook’s bottom line, as reports suggested that these ad units would have roughly the cost of a TV commercial. Sources told Ad Age that these kinds of ads likely wouldn’t be available until this Fall at the earliest. Ad Age wrote that the new target date is sometime in or after October: As of late last year, Facebook was prepping video ads for their debut in the first half of 2013, but the launch was pushed back to the summer. Now it’s unofficially been pushed back until mid-October, according to a source familiar with the product. The given reason is that there are new features Facebook wants to release concurrently with video ads, and they require more software development. But Facebook sales executives are keen to get the long-awaited product into market and are advocating for the product to be shipped as is and for new features to be added later, according to the source. As with most Facebook products, it’s very likely that this would not be a global rollout. Facebook could charge quite a bit (Ad Age sources said that the company could gain $1 million for the ad with a specific demographic, and $2.4 million for a video ad that would be pushed out to all U.S. Facebook users), and test it out with select advertisers. If the backlash to the video ads isn’t as severe as Facebook feared, then it could move forward with a wider range. As users are becoming more weary of advertising in the News Feed, Facebook has worked hard to innovate how it advertises to its users. The company recently streamlined and nixed or combined several of its ad units, so the introduction of an auto-play video ad would be something that Facebook wants to get absolutely perfect, or else the reaction could be severe. Readers: How do you feel about auto-play video ads in News Feed? Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Facebook Director of Small Business Dan Levy announced a milestone of sorts during a small business roundtable in New York: 1 million advertisers have been active on the social network in the past 28 days. continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Luxury accessories designer Michael Kors launched its “What’s in Your Kors” digital-media campaign Tuesday, focusing its efforts on Facebook-owned photo-sharing network Instagram, as well as Twitter. continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Even if it’s not part of Facebook’s big announcement on June 20, it appears that video is a possibility for Instagram. Developer Tom Waddington posted on his blog that he dug deep into Instagram’s code, finding hints the photo-sharing service may add video soon. Waddington wrote that he found video code when he was going through Instagram’s application programming interface, as well as images for play, pause and volume control. This gives more weight to the recent rumors that Facebook will attempt to compete with Twitter’s popular video-sharing program Vine by adding similar capabilities to Instagram. He noted that the mute button stored in the code for a photo-sharing app is the big giveaway that Instagram is working on adding video — if not now, then definitely in the near future. Here’s what tipped off Waddington to the potential for video within Instagram: Despite this, Waddington doesn’t think that the June 20 announcement is about video on Instagram: I’d be doubtful that the event invitations sent out could be anything to do with Instagram. Facebook needs a strong launch for their next product. I can’t see a coffee-cup stain connecting with video features. My best guest would be a Flipboard competitor – Facebook wants to get a coffee-cup’s worth of time each morning. Monthly Active Users is a tough metric to keep growing – the next most important measurement would be Time On Site. A Flipboard-style section, with top social articles, content from RSS feeds and stories from sites you’ve Liked could easily become a daily destination to catch up on the web. And, it’d be sure to push up Time On Site, and, in turn, possible revenue from advertisers. Readers: What do you think Facebook will announce on June 20? Code banner image courtesy of Shutterstock.

The video ads Facebook originally planned to launch this month or in July are now on hold until at least mid-October, Ad Age reported, with sources telling the magazine more development is needed on new features the social network plains to release simultaneously with its video ads. continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Facebook Head of Global Creative Solutions Mark D’Arcy and Director of Engineering Andrew Bosworth both stressed that advertisers on Facebook and elsewhere on the Internet have a lot of work to do during a panel Tuesday at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, “Cannes Seminar: Creativity at Scale.” continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.