Facebook announced that it has over 30 million active small business pages and hopes to turn them into advertisers soon.
Dan Levy, Facebook's director of small business (SMB), revealed the new statistics during a recent Q&A session at Facebook Fit, an event that focuses on helping and improving small businesses. The new statistics reveal a 5 million jump in small businesses with active Pages on the social network. Last November, the numbers stood at 25 million.
Levy said that Facebook's small business focus has undergone a significant revolution in the last few months and has moved from just reviewing and approving SMB advertisements to working more closely with such companies to make sure they have all the information they need.
Recently, the social networking giant faced backslash for a decline in Facebook's reach. Small businesses that didn't pay for advertising on Facebook found it difficult to successfully deliver their message to targeted audiences. A recent study of 100 brand Pages found that posts were being seen by just six percent of users who "liked" the Pages. Levy blamed the situation on the increasing number of connections and updates and said the situation was going to get worse in the future.
"The organic reach issue is not about us making more money," Levy said, according to a TIME report. "The natural extension of Facebook becoming popular and people having more friends and liking more Pages is there's just more and more stories to choose from every day. We have to choose which ones are going to keep them engaged on Facebook."
Facebook kicked off its first Fit session in New York, Tuesday, where the tickets were sold out. As the social network continues to stay busy this summer season, it has also sought help from experts in mobile payment service, Square, tax software company, Intuit, and legal services company LegalZoom to offer best business tips to owners. Tuesday's event witnessed nearly a thousand small business owners, each of which paid $25 entry ticket. The next up is inMiami, Florida, on Thursday, June 19, followed by Chicago, Illinois and Austin, Texas in July. The Facebook Fit concludes the program in August with the final event taking place in the company's HQ city Menlo Park, California. In addition to Levy's keynote at the session, business tips from the best-selling author Rhonda Abrams and technology expert Mario Armstrong will be shared.
The social networking site is also working on building more tools to help small businesses advertise and reach their targeted audiences more effectively. According to TechCrunch, Facebook will release a new feature called 'lookalike targeting' that will allow small businesses to target people similar to their current customer base and also add another tool that will allow small businesses to email clients who are not fans of their Facebook page.
