Facebook’s push to remove redundancies and confusion from advertising took another big step Wednesday, as the company announced some changes to insights to make them easier to understand.

The company has clearly defined metrics such as people talking about this (PTAT) and virality, and made it much simpler to see how a post is performing. Now, page admins can see not just likes, comments, and shares, but also specifically how many clicks a post received.

Facebook has been trying to find ways to make it easier for page admins to understand when a post is gaining popularity (through highlighting it in the admin panel), but now marketers can see how many times a post has been clicked on, as well as negative engagement such as hides and indications of spam.

Page admins also have deeper insights into the demographic makeup of their Facebook fanbase.

These improvements will start today, but will be gradually rolled out, so not everyone will have these new tools at first.

Facebook explained these changes in a blog post:

Facebook News Feed rewards quality posts with greater reach. One major consideration in gauging post quality is the relationship between positive interactions (likes, comments, shares and clicks) and negative interactions (hide post, hide all posts, report as spam, unlike page). Historically, Page Insights has reported on posts’ performance, reach, and engagement in three distinct places. In the new Page Insights, we aggregate all these metrics into a post-specific score card, so marketers can evaluate positive and negative metrics together. This will help Page admins better identify content people interact with, produce more of it, and enjoy increased reach and impact on Facebook.

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Facebook has begun to roll out photo comments for all users. The new feature allows users to share images as comments on posts. The feature will be made available for user to user interactions, but not stories submitted by pages.

Previously, Facebook would allow users to share an image as a comment by posting a link. It would then pull the image as a thumbnail for easy viewing. With this update, Facebook removes this middle step and allows users upload their images directly from their computer. These images appear larger than those shared by links and are hosted directly on Facebook. Users will not need to take the time to upload an image through a hosting site such as Imgur, Photobucket or many others.

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Structured status updates, previously only available on mobile web and desktop, have found their way to a Facebook native application. The latest Facebook for iOS update includes the ability to share what you’re eating, watching or reading.

Facebook also offered enhanced privacy settings, allowing users to change who sees content they’ve already posted.

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Facebook’s June 20 new product announcement is gathering a lot of curiosity by the technology business world. We are all in anticipation over what Facebook will release and how we think it will affect the lives of Facebook users, which now account for 1 in 7 people across the planet. Early indicators based on code released by Facebook point to some form of an RSS tool.

From a user functionality point of view, a feature with RSS feed could be a new channel to find information, or track trending topics within Facebook. Similar to how Reddit has built a very successful aggregator of information through user submitted and promoted content, Facebook could potentially optimize its News Feed to include trending topics amongst Facebook users. Recent interface changes would also support this theory. For example, Facebook has added nested comments making it easier to for users to have conversations based on comments as is popular in Reddit.

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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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