Another 100 days, another 50 million users for Facebook. Just three months after crossing the 200 million user mark, and six months after crossing the 150 million user mark, Facebook announced today that a quarter-billion people are now actively using the site each month. If Facebook were a country, it would now easily be the fourth most populous in the world.

Earlier this month, we noticed an uptick in Facebook’s recent growth. While Facebook has been growing at around 300,000 to 400,000 active users per day for most of the last three quarters, its growth rate increased in recent weeks to around 700,000 to 750,000 new users per day. Keep in mind, however, that as has been the case for most of the last year, about 70% of that growth is happening outside the United States. Nevertheless, Facebook still grew at a 10% monthly clip in the US in June, up to nearly 70 million active users today.

In addition, Facebook has recently released updated engagement stats about the way users interact with different features on the site. Some highlights:

• 30 million users update their statuses at least once each day
• 8 million users become fans of Pages each day
• 10 million videos are uploaded each month
• 1 billion photos are uploaded to the site each month
• 1 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared each week
• 2.5 million events created each month
• 45 million active groups exist on the site
• 30 million users access Facebook each month through a mobile device

We’ll of course continue tracking all the latest Facebook stats for you here on Inside Facebook.

To dive deeper on how you can engage Facebook’s 250 million users through Facebook Pages, Facebook advertising solutions, Facebook Platform applications, or Facebook Connect for your website, check out Inside Facebook’s Facebook Marketing Bible.

The recent spate of enhancements to Facebook Ads is continuing today with several new ways to target Facebook ad campaigns. Last week, Facebook turned on time scheduling, and this weekend, ad editing. Today, it’s enabling three new features: connection targeting, multiple country targeting, and birthday targeting.

Connection Targeting

Connection targeting is perhaps the most robust of the new targeting features. With connection targeting, advertisers can now target their ad to only reach users who are:

1. Fans of any of your Pages
2. Users of any of your Applications
3. Members of any of your Groups
4. Attendees of any of your Events

Basically, Facebook wants to make it easy for business and brands to increase engagement with any users they’re connected to on Facebook through Facebook Ads, using it as a paid notification or cross-promotion channel. You can also target users who are connected to one of your Pages/Groups/Apps/Events but not to another in order to do more specific cross-promotions.

However, currently, advertisers are not able to use the new features to target members of any generic Page, App, Group, or Event. That would be very powerful, but would also encourage targeting behavior that Facebook may not want to enable. Nevertheless, as it currently stands Connection Targeting could be a very powerful tool for marketers and developers to re-engage certain segments of their Page’s fan base or application’s user base.

Multiple Country Targeting

Just like it sounds, multiple country targeting allows advertisers to reach users in multiple countries (up to 25) with a single campaign. Until today, advertisers had to create different ads for each country. Facebook delivers the ad based on a combination of profile data and IP address.

Birthday Targeting

For advertisers interested in reaching Facebook users on their birthdays, Facebook now has a new checkbox to do just that. Birthdays are compelling scenarios for interaction on Facebook, so we expect to see many advertisers take advantage of this feature.

Conclusion

All in all, these enhancements to Facebook Ads should make it easier for more advertisers to run more campaigns. We expect Facebook to release more enhancements over the coming months to better serve the variety of performance advertisers using the service.

RockYou, both one of the largest developers and largest ad networks on the Facebook Platform, has positive news to report on the advertising front: the company tells us that revenues from its ad operations hit an all-time high in June.

While RockYou hasn’t disclosed revenues, it did say eCPMs across its network have roughly doubled since January – a sign of strength for the company’s social network advertising efforts, and the industry overall. RockYou’s report gels with what we’re hearing from others in the space – that eCPMs are growing and the market overall appears to have stabilized.

In addition to its ad network, RockYou also sells integrated sponsorships into its applications and monetizes through direct to consumer virtual currency sales in its games, like Speed Racing, shown below.

RockYou has raised $68 million in four rounds of funding. The company operates one of the largest networks of widgets and distributed applications across Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, Friendster, Orkut, and Bebo.

Yesterday, we wrote about a new home page video experience Facebook has recently been testing for playing video ads and Highlights videos more prominently. Today, Facebook says that the feature has been rolled out to all users.

Here’s how it works: when a sponsored video ad (or Highlights video) thumbnail is clicked, a video player pops up over the News Feed, and the rest of the page is grayed out. Users can like or share the video by clicking buttons that appear on mouseover, or exit by clicking anywhere else on the screen. Previously, these videos played in-line on the right side of the Page.

Here’s how the new overlay video player looks:

It’s the first time we’ve seen this kind of advertising experience (or video experience at all) for that matter on the Facebook home page, which Facebook has kept consistently light on advertising since the site began. Videos shared by friends in the News Feed still play in-line.

“The feature you are seeing is not a new Engagement Ad unit, but an improvement on how users will see videos that they click on in the right column of their homepage,” Facebook says.

“Videos in the Engagement Ad as well as the Highlights section on the home page now expand to appear in an overlay over the home page to improve the user experience and make these videos easier to view. As with many of our recent products, we first tested this feature with a small percentage of users and it has now been rolled out to everyone. ”

Because Facebook users are seeing videos shared from their friends in the stream, Facebook is a good environment for video ads. It will be interesting to see if Facebook makes future modifications to the new video player to provide more value to advertisers.

Retail e-commerce is beginning to happen within Facebook Pages. Take 1-800-FLOWERS.com for example, and how the company recently set up shop inside of its Facebook Page. Now, t-shirt crowdsourcing company Threadless has also integrated shopping in its Facebook Page, and it’s a better example of how retailers can make shopping more social.

Once you click on the New Tees! tab on the Threadless Facebook Page, you’ll be able to browse the week’s new items. For each tee, you can post a comment, which is then published to your Wall and the News Feed if you so choose. If you don’t want to post a comment, but want to let you friends know about a tee, you can share it, publishing it to your Wall and the News Feed.

What’s nice about these social features is that you can share your shopping experience with your Facebook friends without giving away information on your exact purchases. However, Threadless could still improve by making sure that stories generated have engaging content that will pique the interest of friends. Note that the two stories below are rather bare:

Story generated after commenting on a tee:

Story generated after sharing a tee:

Fans can add items to their cart directly within the Threadless Facebook Page. After choosing your size and clicking “Add to cart,” you’re then directed to Threadless.com where you can review your order or return to the Facebook Page and continue shopping. Notice that this check-out experience is different from 1-800-FLOWERS, which allows fans to check-out without ever leaving the Facebook Page. In addition to adding items to your cart, clicking on a T-shirt image and scoring tee designs also take you away from the page to the site.

People share shopping-related content with their friends on Facebook all the time. The key to building a successful e-commerce presence inside Facebook is finding the right balance between encouraging sales and social sharing.

Research film Nielsen has just released new metrics on the web’s largest and stickiest websites. The results? You guessed it: users are spending more time on Facebook than other popular sites from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL.

Top 10 Parent Companies/Divisions for June 2009 (US, Home and Work)

Source: Nielsen NetView

In June, time spent per person increased by over 25% to 4 hours and 39 minutes per person per month (that’s over 9 minutes per user per day, on average), according to Nielsen.

Meanwhile, time spent increased on Google sites to 2 hours and 31 minutes per person per month, but decreased on Microsoft and Yahoo sites. Time spent on News Corp sites (which includes MySpace) also saw a big jump during June.

In a break from traditional product sampling, sweetener brand Splenda is sending Facebook fans samples of its new Splenda Mist product to test reactions from consumers. Creating a Facebook following specifically to form a sample group is a new approach that allowed Splenda to gather personal information as well as all-important demographic data. So far, the experiment has been successful, with Splenda passing out more than 16,000 samples of the new prototype product in just 2 weeks.

Where most brands pass out sample products to gather data, Splenda invited potential focus group members to request samples of the Splenda Mist spray sweetener by becoming fans of its Facebook Page. This allowed the company to better target their key demographic of women 25 and older by using their Facebook profiles.

Once Facebook users land on the Splenda Mist page, a custom application invites them to become fans of the new product to receive a sample. That is then posted in users’ feeds, so friends are exposed to the campaign. With word of the campaign spreading going viral, Splenda was able to surpass their hopes of distributing 10,000 samples in 12 weeks, instead doling out 16,000 samples in just 2 weeks.

“Facebook offered us the opportunity not only to advertise with a brand message and a product message but also the opportunity to solicit feedback and to have our target raise their hand and say, ‘I want to sample this product,’” said Ivy Brown, group product director for Splenda.

We should see more brands embracing this method of forming a focus group, as it can be an easier and cheaper way to find a sample group that’s comprised of targeted demographics. Most of the prerequisite information that brands want is readily available in users’ profile information, and adding information to participants’ friend feeds gets the brand name in front of a much larger group of potential customers should the product go to market. It’s always great to create a buzz about a new product before its release, and Facebook has significant potential to do just that.

Last week, Facebook made an update to Facebook Ads’ campaign management tools, allowing advertisers to choose the specific start and end times for campaigns. Now, Facebook has launched two more new Facebook Ads features: ad editing and HTML reports.

1. Ad Editing

Until now, creating new ads based on existing ones has been cumbersome. Now, if you want to edit your ad’s image, text, and targeting, there’s a new “Edit Ad” link available underneath the ad preview in Ads Manager:

2. HTML Reports

In addition, now when you’re running a Report, you can now specify a date range and view the report in HTML. Just choose the appropriate options inside the “custom report” feature:

The features, along with Facebook’s time scheduling and upcoming dayparting features, are small but important steps in making Facebook Ads more customized and valuable to the increasing variety of advertisers using the Facebook Ads system.

This morning, Slide launched Top Friends, which has about 12 million active users on Facebook, on the iPhone. Ranked #12 on today’s AppData Application Leaderboard, Top Friends allows users to showcase their top friends and interact with them by sending them awards, drinks, and other kinds of fun virtual gifts. Users can also customize their Top Friends profiles with skins and moods.

Top Friends has always been one of the most popular applications on the Facebook Platform, and the new iPhone version seeks to create a seamless experience between Facebook and iPhone through Facebook Connect. Here’s a quick look at some interesting features:

1. The app takes advantage of the iPhone’s geo-location capabilities to let users see which Facebook friends are nearby in real-time. Here’s an example of how Top Friends might look in San Francisco:

2. Syncing with the iPhone address book lets you call, email, text message, and SuperPoke! your contacts easily. Here’s an album cover flow view with different contact options.

3. Browse your friends’ status updates and update your own. If you’re signed into Facebook Connect, you can publish your updates and/or SuperPoke! actions on your Wall and the News Feed.

“Our real-time, social mapping feature is a compelling way to stay connected. You can keep up with your Top Friends and share locations instantly,” said Slide VP strategy and business development Keith Rabois.

Top Friends is another example of Facebook Connect bridging the mobile and Web platforms, and it makes sense. Applications that can offer their users a mobile experience – while still staying connected to the Web through tools like Facebook Connect – will find usage and engagement stats going up.

No one can ever accuse Yuri Milner of not having faith in Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook leadership team. Less than two months ago, Milner’s Russian investment firm DST invested $200 million for just under 2% of the company in the form of preferred stock, without getting a board seat. Now, DST is moving forward with the employee stock purchase agreement it and Facebook announced at the same time it announced the $200 million investment in May.

Under the terms of the common stock purchase plan, DST is offering to buy up to $100 million in Facebook common stock at a $6.5 billion valuation, or $14.77 per share, starting now through sometime in August. (This is less than the $10 billion valuation placed on the purchase of the preferred shares.) Facebook executives do not qualify for the program, though most current and former employees do.

Last year, Facebook’s efforts to help employees sell stock largely didn’t end up going through. Now, many Facebook employees have the chance to cash out at higher valuation levels. Will many employees sell now?

“While individuals must make their own decisions about participating in this program, I’m pleased that the price DST is offering is much greater than the price originally considered last fall,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said. “This is recognition of Facebook’s growth and progress towards making the world more open and connected.”

Facebook says revenues will grow 70% in 2009 to what is estimated to be over $500 million. While Facebook says it isn’t planning on going public for a while, DST is snapping up as much Facebook stock as it can get.