We noticed a new type of notification this morning, one that comes from Facebook and informs you that a certain post on a page on which you’re an admin is “performing better than 90% of other posts on the Page.” It then suggests that you “advertise it to get even better results.”

Various WebProNews writers received this same notification this morning (we’re all admins on the WPN Facebook page). Clicking on the notification takes us to the “Advertise on Facebook” page and gets us started on setting up a promoted post with said article.

Here’s what it looks like in the notifications:

I’ve reached out to Facebook for comment on the test, and will update this article accordingly.

UPDATE: Facebook has confirmed with me that this is a test that they’re running.

This isn’t the first attempt that Facebook has made in recent memory to get page owners to promote more of their posts. Last month, Facebook made a few subtle changes to Pages, including the addition of a new analytics box inside the admin panel. Facebook also softened the language of page promotion, changing the “promote” post button to one that says “boost” post.

“They’re really doing well and growing quickly and that is the right focus for them,” Zuckerberg said. “They have the opportunity to…build community. I am really optimistic about the business and the opportunities.”

He went on to say that the addition of ads could possibly hamper Instagram’s growth. Instagram just surpassed 100 million monthly active users, and the photo-sharing app is growing at a faster rate than Facebook did at this time in its life.

According to Zuckerberg, it’s not that Instagram isn’t drawing any interest from businesses looking to advertise. “Big brands are approaching us,” he said.

You may remember that Facebook has to tread carefully when approaching the topic of ads on Instagram. Last year, Instagram users were up in arms over some proposed changes to the Instagram privacy policy. Originally, the company wanted to add this clause to the terms:

Some or all of the Service may be supported by advertising revenue. To help us deliver interesting paid or sponsored content or promotions, you agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you.

This led to a mostly misguided outrage that Instagram was going to sell users’ photos. What did deserve outrage was Instagram’s tricky, vague, lawyerly language that attempted to describe a future ad product that didn’t yet exist.

Co-founder Kevin Systrom ended up apologizing, saying they were wrong to put the cart before the horse.

“Going forward, rather than obtain permission from you to introduce possible advertising products we have not yet developed, we are going to take the time to complete our plans, and then come back to our users and explain how we would like for our advertising business to work.”

Instagram will be properly monetized, it’s inevitable. Facebook has already put way too much into the acquisition and Instagram is already such a powerful social channel. But for now, at least, it looks like Zuck is fine to let it grow.

The United Nations Children’s Fund Sweden division is calling people out with a powerful new ad campaign: we need money for polio vaccines and your slacktivism isn’t helping.

“Like is on Facebook, and we will vaccinate zero children against polio,” reads a press ad developed pro bono by ad agency Forsman & Bodenfors. “We have nothing against likes, but vaccines cost money. Please buy a polio vaccine at unicef.se. It will only cost you 4 euros, but will save the lives of 12 children.”

The campaign, which is running in print, television, radio, and online, also has a powerful video ad featuring a 10-year-old boy named Rahim.

“My name is Rahim. I’m 10 years old and I live here with my brother,” says the boy as the camera zooms in on a ragged apartment. “Sometimes I worry that I will get sick, like mom got sick. Then who will look after my brother?”

“But I think everything will be alright. Today, UNICEF Sweden has 177,000 likes on Facebook. Maybe they will reach 200,000 by summer. Then we should be alright.”

With the rise of social media, we’ve also seen a rise in “armchair activism” or “slacktivism,” the terms used to describe lazy attempts to support a cause via social media. One prime example was last year’s Kony 2012 campaign, which saw millions of Facebook and Twitter users share viral video about the atrocities of Ugandan LRA leader Joseph Kony.

But you can see fragmented slacktivist campaigns every day on Facebook. “Like this photo and this baby gets the transplant it needs” and so on. Sure, clicking like or sharing a status may make you feel good, but it doesn’t accomplish much more than that.

[Images via UNICEF Sweden]

TechCrunch says that Hegeman confirmed the move on his Facebook Timeline (in a private post). In the post, Hegeman says that he’ll be joining the engineering team at Quora in “a few weeks.” Here’s the post in full:

Today is my last day at Facebook. I feel extremely fortunate to have spent five and a half years working with and learning from such an exceptional group of people. In particular, I want to thank Mark for building this incredible company and my managers Yishan, Kang-Xing, Greg, and Boz for all of the mentorship and opportunities that they have given me. The decision to leave wasn’t easy, but I’m very proud of all that the ads team has accomplished and I’m extremely confident that the team is in good hands. I look forward to seeing the great work I know they will continue to do. Looking forward, I’m excited to be joining the engineering team at Quora in a few weeks. I’m grateful to Adam for this opportunity to work with him and the rest of the team at Quora who are building an incredible product. I can’t wait to get started.

Hegeman has been an engineer on Facebook’s ads team since 2007. Before that, he attended Stanford.

Back in December, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo announced that the company had a new mission. It was a growth mission, to shake up the usual Q&A format that Quora is known for and work to “share and grow the world’s knowledge.” Earlier this year, Quora launched blogs and a rich text editor.

Josh Constine at TechCrunch has a shot of the ads, which look like your basic sidebar ads. The Graph Search ads appear between the page breaks in Graph Search results, if there’s more than one page of results on the particular query.

The ads are not based on your specific Graph Search search – in fact, they’re simply ads targeted to your basic information. This includes age, gender, likes, Open Graph activity, and of course, cookies. Otherwise known as the most basic form of ads that Facebook has employed for years – the ones you see gracing the side of your news feed on desktop. They’ll sport an image, some text, and clicking on them will lead you to a third-party site.

This is small test. The ads are only being tested on a small percentage of Graph Search users, and Facebook has still yet to roll out Graph Search to all users.

Of course, this is just the beginning. Eventually, Graph Search ads could be targeted based on keywords. Like Facebook’s Sponsored Search results of yore, businesses could pay to suggest queries inside the Graph Search bar. But for now, most of you won’t see any ads in Graph Search (considering you even have it). And for those who do, they’ll simply be standard info-targeted ads at the page breaks on search results.

Still, it’s a start. And you know more is coming.

When Facebook first announced Home, they launched a quirky little ad featuring some plane antics. Now, Facebook has unveiled the second Facebook Home ad in this style, made by the people at Wieden+Kennedy. This ad is called “Dinner”:

Facebook also put out this semi-ad called “Launch Day.” It stars Zuckerberg, whose pep talk is flooded with events from on engineer’s news feed. Both of these ads stick with the Facebook Home brings your Facebook life everywhere theme. Check it out:

GM has confirmed to Ad Age that they have decided to once again throw some advertising dollars into Facebook.

“Chevrolet is testing a number of mobile-advertising solutions, including Facebook, as part of its ‘Find New Roads’ campaign,” said Chris Perry, VP Chevrolet marketing in the U.S. “Today, Chevrolet is launching an industry-first, ‘mobile-only’ pilot campaign for the Chevrolet Sonic that utilizes newly available targeting and measurement capabilities on Facebook.”

Big news for GM, sure. But why is this big news for Facebook? Let’s take a brief walk through Facebook and GM’a relationship over the past year.

In May of 2012, just days before Facebook’s IPO, GM announced that they would be pulling all of their Facebook ads. They stated that they simply weren’t convinced that Facebook ads were truly effective, and furthermore were unsure how they fit into their future marketing strategies. It was a high-profile move, at a time when Facebook’s ability to monetize was on everyone’s mind.

Immediately, it felt like a pretty big slap to the face. A public vote of no confidence. A few days later, GM noted that they were making many big advertising decisions at the time. Basically, hey – no hard feelings. It’s all just part of a comprehensive retooling of the strategy. Of course, this did little to neutralize the sting, especially right around the IPO. Facebook’s stock price tanked, people started talking monetization issues, which led to talks about advertising strategies, which of course led to GM as the big example of a company who pulled the plug.

A couple of months later, GM’s marketing head Joel Ewanick resigned – although it wasn’t really tied to the Facebook, specifically.

Since then, multiple reports have suggested that Facebook and GM had reestablished talks. The most recent indicating that the two companies were “actively talking” about a return to a paid advertising partnership.

“We’re still actively talking to them and looking at opportunities that come our way…I wouldn’t tell you that there’s a Mexican standoff here. We just didn’t see the value [in the ads],” said GM’s interim marketing head Alan Batey back in January.

Ad Age says that part of the reason GM pulled out of Facebook in the first place involved the inability for the company to run bigger, “higher-impact” ads. Although that’s still not really possible, Facebook advertising has changed quite a bit in the last year – mainly with the launch of the real-time, cookie-based Facebook Exchange retargeting system.

“We’ve had an ongoing dialogue with GM over the last 12 months and are pleased to have them back as an advertiser on Facebook. We look forward to working even more closely with GM in the coming weeks and months,” said a Facebook spokesperson.

Any way you look at it, it’s a good thing for Facebook that GM has decided to try it again. There’s a chance that it could signify to other companies that it’s safe to open up their Facebook ad budgets a little bit. In the end, we’re not talking about a huge ad budget here that’s going to make or break either Facebook or GM. Before GM yanked their ads last May, it was reported that they had only been spending around $10 million on Facebook ads – hardly a game changer.

[Image via Chevrolet.com]

OK, so you probably heard about Facebook’s big event last Thursday where they unveiled Facebook Home, their Android takeover “app family” that basically turns any phone that installs it into a Facebook Phone. So, during that event, CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced an ad for the feature called “Airplane.” In that ad, we noticed that the background music sounded quite similar to an Eminem song. Specifically, “Under the Influence” off of The Marshall Mathers LP.

Coincidence? Probably.

But the plot thickens.

A few days after the event, Facebook finally released the “Airplane” ad on their official YouTube channel. It’s the same ad that we saw during the event – expect for one small detail. The background song has, without a doubt, been altered. The melody is similar, but not the same.

So…did Facebook have to change up their ad because it reminded people of a decade-old catchy but obscene Eminem song?

Here are exhibits A,B, and C.

The original ad starts at about 28:05 in the video below:

And here’s the Eminem song that the first version of the ad sounds like. NSFW lyrics, obviously:

And finally, here’s the version of the ad that Facebook released this weekend. The song in the background sounds similar, but has been changed around significantly.

Remember the lyrics to that Eminem song:

“You can suck my dick if you don’t like my shit. ‘Cause I was high when I wrote this so suck my dick.”

Maybe that was Facebook’s subtle way of letting us all know that they welcomed the criticism.

Joking aside, it’s not impossible that someone made the last-minute song change because the original song sounded exactly like that Eminem song. Whether it was intentionally designed to mimic that song, or it was just an odd coincidence, someone could have pointed out the resemblance and that prompted the change.

Maybe my brain is just spinning uncontrollably. It’s a Monday afternoon and I didn’t get a lot of sleep over the weekend. But damn if it’s not funny to think about. Especially considering Mark Zuckerberg’s recently unearthed penchant for Eminem jokes.

Shortly after the big reveal, Facebook released an ad for Home. Now, they’ve finally released the other ad – the one that Zuckerberg introduced during the event. The ad, called “Airplane,” attempts to impart the message that having Facebook Home integrates the experience of Facebook into every little aspect of your life. But it’s a little strange. Check it out:

Kind of odd, huh?

Facebook Home will become available on April 12th.

And the main aspect of that experience is the Cover Feed. It features all the fresh content from your Facebook news feed, basically turning your Android device into a photo-oriented, swipeable Facebook hub. You can like, comment, and view notifications directly from your Facebook Home screen – with no need to launch any sort of app. It’s without question the deepest Facebook integration any mobile OS has ever seen.

And you can bet that Facebook it going to try to monetize it.

After the event, CEO Mark Zuckerberg made it clear that ads will be coming to your Facebook Home Cover Feed.

“There are no ads in this yet, I’m sure that one day there will be,” he said. He then repeated his answer when asked again about whether or not ads would be coming to the Cover Feed. According to Zuckerberg, ads are just another kind of content.

C’mon. Don’t look so sour. You didn’t think that Facebook would build a grand new Android-based user experience and leave out the ads, did you?

When Facebook Home launches, it will be downloadable on the HTC One X, HTC One X+, Samsung Galaxy S III and Samsung Galaxy Note II – and eventually the HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4.

And on that same day, the HTC First will launch as the first phone the comes with Facebook Home pre-installed.