The stats, shared Facebook’s Director of Global SMB Markets Dan Levy at BIA/Kelsey’s Interactive Local Media West Conference, show the growth of product meant to make Facebook ad buying more simple for small and medium-sized businesses. Essentially, the promote button asks page owners if they want to pay as little as $5 to sponsor a post they’ve already made and reach more fans and their friends. Page owners do not have to go through the self-serve ad dashboard, which can be overwhelming to a new advertiser.
Levy called out other statistics that show Facebook’s growth among small businesses. There has been a 40 percent increase in active local pages since January, and the number of local business pages using Facebook advertising has nearly doubled. Facebook didn’t provide exact numbers, but in October, COO Sheryl Sandberg said there were 11 million SMBs on the site, 7 million of which have an active Facebook page and 3 million of which make at least one post per week. She told us during a press Q&A that serving small business is “just as important” as helping large advertisers achieve their goals.
According to new stats today, a total of 150 million people visit Facebook pages every day, and nearly half of visits in the U.S. are coming from mobile. This is likely to increase as people use mobile devices more frequently and more businesses begin buying Facebook mobile inventory to drive users to their pages.
Facebook also announced that 3 million page owners are using its mobile page manager app, which launched six months ago. In September, page owners gained the ability to buy Promoted Posts through the mobile app.
