Earlier this week, the social media giant Facebook announced that it has crossed over two million active advertisers on its platform. Interestingly, further insights in the results reveal that small and medium enterprises (SMEs) form majority of those 2 million active advertisers on Facebook.
As reported by the Reuters, more than 30 million small business owners have Facebook pages and the two million active advertisers (those that have placed an ad on the social media platform in the last 30 days) consists mainly of small- and medium-sized business owners.
It’s not surprising that Facebook is of great value and an important marketing tool for small businesses. With significant decrease in Facebook’s organic reach in past year it can also be implied that businesses are bound to advertise to reach their audience. And with massive presence of small businesses on the platform, it can be expected that Facebook advertising among the small businesses will continue to grow.
Moreover, Facebook is not only pushing for businesses to advertise on its platform, it is also making it relatively easier with new tools and easy to reach services. The recent announcement of its ads manager app marking two million advertisers also comes in bid to make advertising seemingly easier and accessible.
Facebook reveals that businesses in overall spend on average around $5 to $50 a day. This however is not specific to SMEs and also account for relatively larger sum that big companies spend on the social media giant.
According to eMarketer (as mentioned in the Reuters report), Facebook increased its share of digital advertising to 7.8 percent in 2014 from 5.8 percent in 2013. The latest earnings of Facebook in fact suggest fourth-quarter revenue growth by 49 percent to $3.85 billion from the same period a year ago.
Meanwhile, Google although remains the giant in digital advertising, its market share of 31.1 percent reduced slightly from 33.6 percent in 2013 and this shows the growing competition in the field.
Although Facebook notes case studies of some businesses (see The Produce Box, HotelNow, in its announcement, it will be interesting to see how the majority of these two million active advertisers are gaining real business value from the platform.
