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.

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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.

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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 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.

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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.

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Be careful with the way you use Facebook’s tools. The minimum age function is great for filtering out teenagers from pages about adult topics like alcohol, but this is something you should decide when you first create your page and then never touch it again. For example, if you raise the minimum age of your page, you instantly wipe out your young fans.

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As part of Facebook’s growing push to simplify its advertising offerings, the company announced Monday that the commonly-used page post link ads will become easier to use and customize.

Page post link ads are usually a brand’s best bet to drive conversions from Facebook, and the company wants to make them easier to create. One of the main complaints from advertisers regarding this ad unit is the lack of customization available. Advertisers previously have been unable to upload a new and optimized teaser image to accompany the ad, so Facebook built this capability and launched it Monday.

Additionally, Facebook simplified the flow for unpublished page post link ads and improved the process of creating an ad.

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Rumors are circulating that Facebook may be adding video to Instagram at its June 20 product announcement. Many news outlets suggested that Facebook would be introducing a news reader prior to this speculation.

The introduction of video to Instagram would be a direct response Twitter’s video sharing service, Vine. Since its public release for iOS in January, Vine has grown significantly in popularity and its release for Android earlier this month has only bolstered this following.

There are several clues suggesting that video may be the next step for Instagram, which now boasts of 100 million active users. For example, Facebook has prevented Vine from using its friend-finding feature. By doing this, Facebook looks embed users into its platform first, rather than a service like Twitter.

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Facebook recently introduced something that has been a staple of social media for years — hashtags. However, hashtags on Facebook feel somewhat incomplete. Facebook only rolled out hashtags on Wednesday to a portion of its users, leaving brands unable to take full advantage of this new feature, as many users were bewildered.

While Facebook’s younger and power users, who are also on Twitter and Instagram (where hashtags are the norm), may have understood, it confused others who aren’t on those other social channels.

So why did Facebook introduce support for hashtags, which are now searchable and clickable for some users? As other sites have speculated, Facebook (empowered by its acquisition of Storylane) could possibly announce on June 20 a revamp of notes or some other kind of blogging service that would serve as a Tumblr competitor. While this is not to say that Facebook will unveil such a product, it could happen in the future. Someday, users might be able to sort through posts and notes searchable by hashtags.

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Facebook habitually prompts users to like more pages. The site will ask you to like similar pages after you’ve liked pages, and now some users are seeing prompts on their News Feed to like pages their friends have recommended.

For some users, there’s a notification in the birthday/events area of News Feed, which leads to a list of pages that their friends have liked. It will also ask the user to promote a page that they manage.

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