Helping small businesses succeed in a mobile world

It’s no secret – when small busi­ness­es suc­ceed, com­mu­ni­ties thrive.

We want to build and empow­er com­mu­ni­ties, which is why Face­book and Insta­gram are com­mit­ted to help­ing small busi­ness­es grow. As more peo­ple turn to their phones to dis­cov­er new things, small busi­ness­es need a strong mobile strat­e­gy. Face­book is the mobile solu­tion for 65 mil­lion busi­ness­es with Pages and 8 mil­lion with pro­files on Instagram.

And with more than 5 mil­lion active adver­tis­ers on Face­book, we need to pro­vide solu­tions for busi­ness­es so cus­tomers can learn more about their prod­ucts, vis­it web­sites, down­load an app or even send messages.

We’re proud of our online com­mu­ni­ty of small busi­ness­es and want to make con­nect­ing with cus­tomers as easy as possible.

With Face­book and Insta­gram, small busi­ness­es can:

Save time and see what’s working

With the Adverts Man­ag­er app, you can man­age your adverts and gain insight in just a few taps. We’ve even updat­ed the app to opti­mise your time.

At a glance, you can see how adverts for your Pages are per­form­ing, or see a snap­shot of how your advert account has per­formed this week com­pared to the pre­vi­ous week. And the improved nav­i­ga­tion also allows you eas­i­ly switch between your accounts and Pages. You’ve even got the option of select­ing up to five adverts and com­par­ing them side by side.

We’re also com­mit­ted to help­ing you improve the per­for­mance of your adverts. The app now rec­om­mends actions you can take to increase advert per­for­mance – and makes it easy for you to do so in one click. For exam­ple, we’ll noti­fy you when a high-per­form­ing advert (com­pared to your oth­er sim­i­lar adverts) is about to end and give you a one-click option to extend the sched­ule for anoth­er one, three or sev­en days.

You’ll receive noti­fi­ca­tions for rel­e­vant inter­ests to add to your tar­get­ing in order to increase an active advert’s per­for­mance, along with a one-click option to add our sug­gest­ed inter­ests to your tar­get­ing cri­te­ria. We’ll also send noti­fi­ca­tions about recent­ly-end­ed, high-per­form­ing adverts and give you a one-click option to dupli­cate the adverts.

Get creative

Cre­ativ­i­ty has nev­er been more impor­tant for busi­ness­es, and now, even the biggest ideas can fit in the palm of your hand. Mobile has lev­elled the cre­ative play­ing field, giv­ing all busi­ness­es the abil­i­ty to deliv­er world-class cre­ative to peo­ple around the world. But small busi­ness­es tell us they want faster, eas­i­er and more cost-effi­cient ways to cre­ate new con­tent for Face­book and Insta­gram. That’s why we cre­at­ed Mobile Stu­dio, a new way to show busi­ness­es how easy it is to cre­ate great adverts using only a mobile device.

All busi­ness­es can improve their cre­ative, and ulti­mate­ly, the effi­ca­cy of their adverts with mobile apps and tools – and with Mobile Stu­dio, you’ll learn to do these things in min­utes. Don’t miss these impor­tant tips to help you bring your busi­ness­es to life with­out eat­ing up time, ener­gy or resources.

Learn new skills

Blue­print eLearn­ing cours­es give you the pow­er to learn best prac­tices for adver­tis­ing on Face­book’s fam­i­ly of apps and ser­vices at your own pace.

The online edu­ca­tion plat­form is avail­able in ten lan­guages, and today more than 1 mil­lion unique users – half being small busi­ness­es – use Blueprint.

Some top cours­es include Face­book Ter­mi­nol­o­gy, A/B Test­ing and Suc­cess­ful Cam­paigns Best Prac­tices, and we’re adding new cours­es each month. In fact, almost 2.5 mil­lion eLearn­ing cours­es have been tak­en by peo­ple across more than 150 coun­tries, and 50% of our total course enrol­ments are tak­en by small or medi­um busi­ness own­ers and employees.

Communicate with customers

Respond­ing to your cus­tomers quick­ly is key to deliv­er­ing good cus­tomer ser­vice but it can be hard to keep up with the vol­ume of com­mu­ni­ca­tions com­ing in. In Novem­ber 2016, we announced a sin­gle inbox to man­age com­mu­ni­ca­tions across Face­book, Mes­sen­ger and Insta­gram with­in the Pages Man­ag­er app. Today, we’re expand­ing these capa­bil­i­ties to desktop.

• Inter­na­tion­al looka­likes can help busi­ness­es find new peo­ple that look like their best cus­tomers in oth­er countries.
• Worldwide/global region tar­get­ing can help busi­ness­es set up a glob­al cam­paign and find effi­cient conversions.
• Coun­try snap­shots and insights play­book can help busi­ness­es cre­ate cus­tomised cam­paigns in each country.

In the com­ing weeks, we’ll intro­duce new ways for busi­ness­es to bet­ter reach peo­ple in urban areas and in mul­ti­ple lan­guages more efficiently.

Learn from like-minded business owners

We rely on small busi­ness­es to help us learn bet­ter ways to help busi­ness­es grow, which is why we’ve cre­at­ed the Face­book Small Busi­ness Coun­cil. Today, we’re pleased to launch a site ded­i­cat­ed to our coun­cil sto­ry in the US.

This new site fea­tures sto­ries of ded­i­ca­tion, pas­sion and resilience from more than 40 busi­ness­es across a vari­ety of indus­tries and geo­gra­phies, but who share a com­mon belief in the impor­tance of serv­ing their cus­tomers, their com­mu­ni­ties and each other.

We’ve cre­at­ed small busi­ness coun­cils in the US, India, Brazil and Ger­many – and plan to announce coun­cils in more coun­tries lat­er this year.

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