The focus might still be onFacebook’s new Timeline and media partnershipsbut today the world’s largest social network hasannounced it wil partnerwith National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to provide tools, resources and up to $10 million in Facebook Ads to help small businesses in the U.S thrive. According tothe joint press release, the effort is to help small businesses acquire and retain customers, assist them in building a community interested in their brand and extend the opportunities to reach new customers....

Facebook was preparing to release an update to its app for the iPhone Thursday, reports theFinancial Times. The update plans were revealed when Facebook was contacted by the publication to comment on how terrible the feedback is on the current version of the app. Besides saying that an update to the app would be available on Thursday, Facebook says it had only one engineer working on the app while its mobile team has been working on apps for Android and other mobile platforms....

Facebook has slowly but surely been looking for ways to monetize its investment in WhatsApp, adding newseveralfeaturesfor businesses over the past few years. Now the company is turning it into a straight-up shopping hub — in a few countries, at least. Facebookintroduced Shopsin 2020 as a way to turn Facebook and Instagram pages into digital storefronts, with a particular emphasis on small businesses. The company noted at the time that the feature would be coming to WhatsApp (and Messenger), so today’s announcement isn’t exactly a surprise....

Just a day afterpublicly launching new smart listsand better suggestions, categorising your friends based on demographic information, Facebook will introduce over the next few days features that could, put simply, eliminate your desire to use any other social network. Starting today, Facebook will begin rolling out a new “Subscribe” feature that will provide granular control over what your friends share with you, but also provide you with a way to share updates with a wider audience without having to befriend them....

Facebookis in the process of rolling out changes to their advertising analytics tool, with some users seeing new data on ad reach, average frequency and target funnel statistics. Essentially, Facebook are introducing new performance indicators centered around social actions rather than CPM. This represents a fairly significant change in strategy, one that I have no doubt we’ll see have its effects on online advertising more widely in the near future. These social performance indicators do a better job of informing the advertiser on the effectiveness on their campaigns than mere views and clicks....