Facebook Hits 5 Million Advertisers, Launches Tools for Small Businesses

Social-media giant Facebook announced Monday it has over 5 million monthly advertisers, up from 4 million in September and 3 million in March 2016. The social network also announced its new suite of advertising services for small businesses.

The updated suite will focus on advertisers’ mobile strategy, providing more options for creating ad content and boosting ad performance. With the Ads Manager app, users can get insight into how ads for business pages are performing, compare ads side-by-side and reinstate high-performing ads with one click. Additionally, Facebook’s new Mobile Studio enables business owners to create quick, cost-effective photo and video ads using a mobile device.

Nearly half of Facebook advertisers create ads on mobile devices and 90 percent of Facebook’s 1.9 billion users access the network through mobile devices. The platform also caters to small business owners through its audience targeting feature, a desktop tool for managing customer messages and online courses for using the new tools, which are available in 10 languages so far.

“Small businesses provide such important products and services, but they also are a huge engine of job growth in a world where job growth is increasingly uncertain and something people really worry about,” Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said.

Over 65 million businesses have Facebook pages and 5 million now have Instagram profiles, the company announced in its fourth-quarter earnings call.

Facebook’s announcement comes on the heels of other social media sites launching new platforms for small business owners. Instagram announced last month it hit 1 million monthly advertisers, the majority of which are small businesses. The Facebook-owned company plans to expand its free suite of business tools this year with an integrated booking function that gives users the ability to book services and make reservations. Last month Pinterest unveiled its new advertising called Pinterest Propel. Aimed at small and medium-sized businesses, the platform provides free one-on-one support from ad experts to help businesses build cost-effective campaigns, gain new customers and analyze traffic, sales and online actions.