Photo: Jon Snyder/WIRED
One of the world’s biggest businesses is counting on small businesses for growth.
On Tuesday, Facebook kicked off a series of events for small business owners in the hopes of convincing more of them to start advertising and marketing on its popular social networking service. At the first so-called Facebook Fit event in New York City, Facebook’s small business director Dan Levy announced that there are now 30 million small businesses with active Facebook pages–that’s 5 million more than there were in the fourth quarter of 2013–but even as the number of pages has grown, only about 1 million of those small businesses are actually advertising on Facebook. That gap poses a big business opportunity for the tech giant.
At the same time, however, many businesses have been outraged by the fact that Facebook has been limiting their organic reach, meaning fewer people who “Like” a brand on Facebook actually see its posts. Valleywag recently reported that the tech giant could be cutting that reach to just 1 or 2 percent in an attempt to force more people to pay for ads in order to get exposure.
By hosting a road show like this, Facebook can simultaneously placate entrepreneurs by educating them on how to improve their reach without ads, while simultaneously leading those audiences of entrepreneurs to their paid products. “With organic reach we understand people’s frustration, and we understand people built businesses this way,” Levy told WIRED after the presentation. “We’re trying to explain what we did, so Facebook becomes a predictable place people can use to grow their business.”
The most predictable way, of course, is with advertising. Levy told the audience full of entrepreneurs story after story of how people have used Facebook’s advertising tools to grow their businesses. He told them about new products, like the custom audience feature, which allows businesses to import their lists of existing customers and send targeted Facebook ads to those people. The lookalike audience feature, another relatively new one, takes that one step further, allowing business owners to target ads to their existing customers as well as other customers who Facebook says are just like them.
Levy also touted Facebook’s Page Manager App, which gives businesses a way to track metrics on their pages for free. If a post is performing especially well, the app will suggest that the business owner pay to turn it into a promoted post, which gets more exposure. According to Levy, that’s the gateway to advertising for 70 percent of Facebook’s new advertisers.
Self-serving as this boot camp may seem for Facebook, though, it does has obvious benefits for small business owners, too. For starters, it’s a networking event, which includes panel discussions with business owners and marketing professionals who have built successful brands Facebook. Facebook–which is taking the event to Miami, Chicago, Austin, and the Bay Area next–is also hosting training sessions on how business owners can use the platform to increase sales online and in-stores. That, Levy says, was inspired by the ad hoc training sessions already being taught by business owners in meet-up groups around the country. “We realized we need to be out helping them more, because it’s what small businesses need to succeed,” he says, admitting, “It’s probably something we should have reaized a lot earlier.”
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