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.

iNvolved Media

Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer iNvolved Media this week announced a new interactive video unit to run across social, mobile and web content.  The Video StoryEngine, as it’s called, allows companies to to add a video layer to their premium media placements, including in the Facebook News Feed. Speed Stick used the technology for its Super Bowl spot, running an interactive, gamified version across more than 500 sports sites and within the Facebook News Feed that day. Hundreds of thousands of people engaged with Video StoryEngine’s trivia game. Other tests show Video StoryEngine leads to increases in recall, response, sharing, Likes and comments compared to videos that are not delivered through the new platform. Video StoryEngine is available with CPCV or CPE pricing, with clients paying only when viewers watch thirty seconds or engage with the brand’s interactive video.

Moontoast/SHIFT

Mobile rich media ad provider Moontoast today announced a strategic partnership with SHIFT, a collaboration platform for marketers and agencies. Moontoast will integrate with SHIFT’s Open Marketing Cloud, a suite of applications from partners covering media buying, community management, social promotions, analytics and more. The integration will give advertisers a way create, post and amplify social rich media ad units in the Facebook News Feed from within the SHIFT platform. Both companies are Facebook Preferred Marketing Developers that have forged partnerships with a number of PMDs and other advertising platforms.

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

For “24,” the page’s increased engagement has spurred from a single post announcing the renewal of the series. With over 100k shares, the page has been able to experience growth virally. Page activity and PTAT will probably not be sustained until production begins, unless the page has a content strategy plan in place to produce more regular updates in the meantime.

Riding on the coattails of the release of “Iron Man 3″, “Agents of the S.H.I.E.L.D.” has been marketing heavily through Facebook advertising. The page’s managers have been purchasing ads to increase total page Likes to help reach more people. In the graph below, it can be seen that page’s Like growth rose significantly after May 10, but leveled out around May 19. Viacom has recently found through a study that Facebook users that like a TV Show page are 75 percent more likely to watch those shows. By acquiring Likes now, the show looks primed to earn high ratings early.

Visit PageData to see more about the top talked about TV Show pages as well as other categories. Now only $19.95 a month.

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.

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.

Although this feature is hard to discover and not particularly intuitive for most page owners, it is useful to have the “hide from News Feed” option in the composer. Previously, users could only create unpublished posts via the self-serve ad tool, Power Editor or API. The image below is from the ads tool, after selecting “Promote Page Posts” and “Create New Page Post.”

Facebook first added the option for pages to make unpublished posts through the Pages API in July 2012, but these posts were only eligible for promotion in the right hand sidebar of the site. In March of this year, however, Facebook opened up its News Feed inventory to ads created from unpublished posts.

Facebook offers some page post targeting by age, gender, location and other demographic information, there is no organic way to target posts by interests or factors like Custom Audiences. But with unpublished posts that run as page post ads in News Feed, businesses can show users more relevant content. For example, service could show longtime users one version of an ad, new users another, and leads yet another. Or an app page could make an unpublished post to promote to iPhone users and another aimed at Android users. Other brands are using unpublished posts simply to test different ad creative and optimize their campaigns.

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.

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.

Another mention is in the live source code for Facebook.com. A reference to ”EntstreamHashtagOverlay” links hashtags to Facebook’s hovercard feature. This suggests users will be able to hover over a hashtag to get more information, similar to what they can do for people, apps and pages, as seen below.

Waddington also noticed that Facebook.com/hashtag redirects to Facebook.com, leading us to believe the company could be saving this page for an unreleased feature, otherwise it would lead to a 404 error page.

In March, anonymous sources told the Wall Street Journal, AllThingsD and TechCrunch that Facebook was working to integrate hashtags into its service to help users follow trending topics, search for news and contribute to conversations around a particular issue. That same month, Facebook added a job listing for a data editor to join the consumer communications team “responsible for amplifying the many exciting ways people are using Facebook and connecting with others during global events, holidays and other significant moments in time.”

Shortly after, the company added a multiple listings related to strategic partner development, such as roles focused on entertainment companies and public figures in Brazil and Asia, as well as musicians and athletes in the U.S.  In April, Facebook added a listing for a Public Content Partnerships Analyst to use “quantitative analysis, data mining and the presentation of data to communicate how our partners engage with our product.”

Facebook has not commented on the possibility of hashtags on the platform. Users can already include hashtags in their posts — and many do, often for stylistic reasons — but these do not generate links to more posts with the same hashtags. On other services, hashtags serve to label and group conversations. Although they are most associated with Twitter, they have roots in early Internet chat networks and have more recently taken off on Instagram, which Facebook now owns.

Hashtags could give Facebook users new ways to engage with people and content outside their network of friends. The feature could also lead to better ways of searching posts. With Graph Search, Facebook removed the ability to search public conversations. Hashtag search could replace that and improve Facebook’s existing photo search by letting users tag their contents as they do on Instagram.

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.

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.

However, with the option for user-generated photos comes an increase in spam, which Places Editors are working to remove. For example, in the image below, someone has uploaded a screenshot from a social game for an island in Florida. Other people are adding photos of themselves or memes. Business owners should be aware of how their locations might be presented on Facebook and take steps to claim their page and merge any duplicates.

Thanks to Emile Dingemans for the tip.

This is a guest post by Mario Zelaya, Managing Director at 

Marketers are starting to focus more on social media efforts, realizing that it’s an important piece of the marketing puzzle. They’ve started to use social media, but only as an extension of a traditional campaign or as a small marketing initiative on the side. Many of them are hesitant to rely too heavily on social media. They’re willing to let social media ride in the car, but they’re reluctant to give them the keys.

According to a report released by Social Media Examiner at the end of 2012, 83 percent of marketers have said that social media was important to their business. However, the CMO survey released in February found that marketers are only allocating 8.4% of their budget for social media.

Many believe that in order for a campaign to succeed, it always needs to be integrated across different channels. This is simply not the case. At Majestic Media, we’ve seen time and time again that a fully digital campaign, or even a fully social campaign, can reach hundreds of thousands of consumers, achieving millions of social impressions and engagement, and generate a tremendous amount of traffic.

Majestic Media recently launched a social campaign for Maple Leaf Foods, promoting their new product, Bacon Portions. It was a simple Facebook Application that allowed users to pledge to “Never Waste Bacon” and enter for the chance to win a year supply of bacon.  Yes, bacon.  Not a brand new car, $25,000 or an extravagant trip, simply bacon.

The campaign was launched organically on Facebook, posting on Maple Leaf’s Facebook Page for current fans to see. Within 12 hours, we had reached 3,458 pledges. Following the launch, Maple Leaf Foods started a small paid campaign on Facebook consisting of Promoted Posts and Sponsored Stories. Within a week, we saw nearly 19,000 pledges and #NeverWasteBacon was the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter in Canada.

Facebook was the primary focus, but Twitter and Instagram also played a large part in the success of the #NeverWasteBacon campaign (which is still running).

Maple Leaf was able to gain a huge amount of traffic without incorporating traditional mediums like radio, TV, or print. They were able to generate such a large amount of organic traffic because they took the time to build an audience. They spent time interacting with their followers and provided them with engaging, relevant content.

Social media has the power to drive a major campaign, but only if you do it right. This might seem obvious, but you’d be surprised by how many brands blame a failed Facebook campaign on the social network, rather than the fact that they didn’t take the time to prepare.

Social campaigns can be wildly successful if you have the right strategy in place, give people the incentive and the encouragement to share with friends and spend the time listening and building up your audience to ensure what you launch is inline with what they want to engage with.  Campaigns don’t always need to be fully integrated and rely heavily on paid media to be wildly successful.

Mario Zelaya is the founder and managing director of Majestic Media, Canada’s first Facebook Marketing & Technology agency. His extensive experience on the Facebook Platform includes building out social strategy, campaign ideation, app architecture, and social design for brand clients such Volkswagen, Kia, General Motors, Mazda, Gatorade, Hot Wheels, Infiniti, Nissan, Visa and many others. Majestic Media has executed over 200 large-scale campaigns and works with big brands and agencies in helping them to get results and ROI through campaigns that are social by design. Follow Majestic Media & Mario on Twitter @majesticmedia @zelaya.