Digital promotions platform Ifeelgoods today announced that it has been named a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer with an Apps badge.

The company offers customizable white-labeled Facebook apps that deliver digital rewards to customers. For example, a retailer could incentivize people to make a large purchase by giving them a $10 iTunes gift card in return. After the user completes a transaction, the Ifeelgoods integration will allow him or her to connect with Facebook and claim the gift card. Users will also be prompted to share back to Facebook or on Twitter. Ifeelgoods says 60 percent of customers do this.

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Atlas view tags can now be used to measure Facebook ads targeted to custom audiences, partner categories and lookalike audiences, the social network informed its largest advertisers this week.

Those targeting types are relatively new to Facebook and weren’t previously supported in the Atlas platform, which advertisers and agencies use to plan, manage, track and optimize their digital marketing. Facebook recently bought Atlas from Microsoft. Now, the tool will enable advertisers to track Facebook’s new ad types the same as any other. This gives advertisers better view-through measurement on their campaigns that take advantage of the social network’s latest capabilities.

Custom audiences allows advertisers to retarget consumers by email addresses, phone numbers or user IDs they already have from previous marketing or sales interactions. “Lookalike audiences” helps advertisers target users similar to those in their custom audience databases, using algorithms to identify audience segments with the same customer profiles. Partner categories are audience segments created by third-party data providers that U.S. advertisers can use for targeting via Power Editor or the API. These categories are informed with transactional data, survey information and other online or offline behaviors. Collectively, these represent tremendous new opportunities for advertisers to target Facebook users by first-party or third-party data.

The social network agreed to acquire Atlas from Microsoft in February. The deal closed at the end of April, and the Atlas team in Seattle is now officially part of Facebook. The company says it bought Atlas to improve measurement capabilities for advertising both on Facebook and across other digital platforms. Atlas says it is working to update its user interface to be more intuitive and effective, as well as create “unique differentiators under Facebook.”

Retargeting platform AdRoll announced today that it has added the option for advertisers to run self-serve Facebook Exchange retargeting ads in the News Feed. Facebook made this inventory available to Qualified DSPs, including AdRoll, earlier this month. Previously, AdRoll and other companies could only run FBX ads in the right hand sidebar of Facebook.com, but now they can bid on desktop News Feed placement. AdRoll says early tests show clickthrough rates in the single-digit percentages for News Feed, as opposed to fractions of percent in the sidebar. Unlike other retargeting ads, retargeted News Feed ads incorporate Facebook’s share, comment, and like functionalities, which leads to additional engagement and viral potential. An example of a News Feed FBX ad is below. AdRoll is actually running FBX ads retargeting visitors to its own site.

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Revitalized action series, “24,” tops this week’s list of top gaining tv show pages in the People Talking About This metric. Also among the top ten this week is reality series of former child actors, “Tia & Tamera” and upcoming “The Avengers” spin-off series, “Agents of the S.H.I.E.L.D.”

Of the top 10 pages, the top three are shows have yet to begin their season, while six have just aired their season finales last week.

This list of top gaining TV Show pages is compiled with PageData, which tracks page growth and engagement across Facebook.

#	Name	People Talking About		Weekly Growth
1	24	483,952		+474,978
2	Tia & Tamera	394,900		+258,790
3	Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.	261,039		+238,063
4	Grey’s Anatomy	1,083,155		+219,380
5	The Simpsons	532,328		+167,244
6	How I Met Your Mother	326,211		+155,120
7	Arrested Development	319,974		+125,860
8	Survivor	197,924		+110,691
9	Bones	134,922		+76,216
10	Family Guy	350,255		+75,586

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Facebook has a new “schedule gift” feature for its Gifts product, which allows users to buy something for a friend, but notify them at a later date. Previously, recipients would receive a notification immediately after the gift was purchased.

Now, when users get to the review page after selecting a gift and writing a card, there is a section where they can choose when to notify the recipient. The default is to notify the friend now, but users can also pick a day up to two weeks in advance. This option gives Facebook Gifts an additional convenience now that users can buy a birthday gift or something for another special occasion ahead of time, rather than having to complete the purchase the day of.

The social network used to offer scheduled gifts from its virtual Gift Shop in 2009, but it hadn’t brought the feature to its new Gifts product until now. The old Gift Shop was primarily a way to share virtual stickers on a friend’s Wall, until it was shut down in July 2010. The new Facebook Gifts, launched in September 2012, focuses on physical gifts, like food, wine, home goods and tchotchkes, as well as digital goods like gift cards and subscriptions to streaming services.

There is not a way to schedule the delivery of a gift for a particular day because Facebook Gifts asks the recipient for their address when they are first notified about the gift.

Facebook is testing a new way for page owners to create “unpublished posts” — those that intentionally do not appear to all fans of their page – directly from the composer on their page.

Unpublished posts do not appear on a page’s Timeline or in fans’ News Feeds, but they can be promoted with ads. This allows page owners to make posts that are tailored to a specific audience and ensure that they are only seen by that audience, not distributed to anyone who Likes the page. It also creates a way for advertisers to test different creative options for their page post ads without overwhelming their fans with multiple posts.

Now page owners can make these kinds of posts directly from their page by clicking the clock icon used to schedule posts. After users select a year, a “hide from News Feed” option will appear. Checking that box will prevent the post from being distributed to fans’ feeds, though it will still appear on the page’s Timeline. Then a page could promote the post or use it as part of a page post ad in the mobile or desktop News Feed.
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Nimble

Social CRM company Nimble this today released a new version of its platform with more features for managing business contacts. A new “Today Screen” is an improved dashboard with a to-do list, milestones and key events among a user’s network. The “Signals Screen” gives users notifications from across their social networks, such as invitations, likes, shares and mentions. Nimble also made updates to its search feature and created a way for users to easily retrieve their last contacted connection. Nimble now connects with more than 100 other platforms so users can bring in all their contacts and audiences.

Crowdbabble

Toronto-based start-up Crowdbabble today announced its Real-Time Facebook Monitor, a tool for Facebook page admins to monitor their pages and keep track of competitors. Users can get real-time analytics or generate historical reports. It aims to help page owners understand when they should post and how often, along with how well their posts are performing and how they compare to others in the business.

References to hashtags in Facebook’s code suggest the social network could be working on bringing the feature — popular on Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr — to its own platform.

Developer Tom Waddington from Cut Out + Keep, who has discovered a number of unreleased Facebook features in the past, today pointed us to a mention of the word “hashtag” in Facebook’s Javascript SDK. He says this likely for an XFBML hashtag plugin, similar to the hashtag tracking widget Twitter offers developers and publishers.

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Facebook today announced the availability of a new native share dialog for iOS, which will give developers an easy way to incorporate Facebook sharing — including Open Graph actions — in their apps.

The mobile share dialog is a standard tool that enables users to post something back to Facebook. Similar to the Like button, the share dialog can be implemented with a small amount of code across any app and it works even if users haven’t logged into the app using Facebook. The dialog includes support for location tagging, friend tagging, custom privacy settings, deep linking and more.

Previously, mobile developers would have had to program their own sharing mechanism with these features or use the old “feed dialog” or iOS 6 Share Sheet, which are more limited in functionality and can require up to three extra steps for users.

Unlike Share Sheet, the native share dialog supports Open Graph publishing, as seen in the “read a book” example to the right. This is important because until now, developers had to ask users to log into their app using Facebook and allow various publishing permissions, which some users did not like.

Now, because the share dialog opens up the main Facebook app to complete the action, users don’t need to log into a third-party app with Facebook in order to share back via the Open Graph. As long as users have the Facebook app and are logged into that, they can easily publish to Facebook from any iOS app that uses the share dialog. This could greatly increase the amount of structured sharing through Open Graph verbs and objects.

Facebook first announced the native share dialog, along with other new mobile platform features, in April. However, it was only available in limited beta for iOS until today’s wide release. It is still in development for Android. The company says the share dialog should be used by default in all mobile apps that want to enable users to share something to the social network, even if the apps don’t have deeper Facebook integration, such as login or Open Graph.

[Update: Cut Out + Keep's Tom Waddington pointed us to a mention in Facebook's Javascript SDK that suggests a similar share dialog with Open Graph support could be coming soon for the web.]

Facebook offers a detailed comparison of all of a developer’s options for sharing back to Facebook — including the new share dialog, iOS Share Sheet, web-based feed dialog and Graph API – here. Technical documentation on the native share dialog is available here.

As part of the social network’s continuing efforts to build out its location database, Facebook now allows users to upload and suggest photos for unadministered place pages.

Facebook’s location platform relies heavily on user-generated content and community editing. Anyone can create a place or edit the details of an existing place, such as the category, business hours, website or other information. Some place pages are run by the people or organizations that own them, and in those cases, they can designate their own profile picture. This new feature applies to places that don’t have an admin.

Unadministered places are ones that are not managed by a person, business or organization, and are often cities, public parks or local businesses that haven’t claimed their page on Facebook. They do not appear in Timeline format like claimed places do. These rely on Facebook users and a community of power users called “Places Editors” to be filled out with complete information and photos.

Previously, users could suggest the place’s official website and then select one image from the site to serve as the profile picture of that place. Earlier this month, Facebook began rolling out a new way for users to add any photo to serve as the profile picture. Users can now upload a new photo or choose from one of their existing albums. Other users can vote on the submitted photos, and the most popular one becomes the profile picture. The other images become part of an album for the place.
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