It’s no secret that small business owners typically don’t have pockets deep enough to effectively advertise their products or services, but Facebook recently announced new efforts to help them extend their reach. These owners typically don’t have Facebook account representatives and are left to figure out the efforts by themselves, so the social network is stepping in to help.
“All the traditional things people think about – like a sales channel through YP or a call center – they’re all good, but we’re dealing with a scale that’s really unprecedented,” said Dan Levy, Facebook’s director of small business, according to AdAge. “And trying to figure out how you unlock that is intellectually fun, but really hard.”
Small businesses long have complained that their posts on the website go unseen and are buried by the 1,500 posts that average users get per day. Typically, the only way around companies’ ads being buried is for them to pay up to the social media giant to ensure the posts are seen by fans who “liked” the pages on their own to begin with.
Social@Ogilvy recently conducted an analysis of 106 brands it has administrator access to and found that the average reach of their Facebook posts declined from 12.05 percent in October to 6.15 percent in February. Facebook has even begun telling people that eventually, organic reach will plummet to zero because “content that is eligible to be shown in news feed is increasing at a faster rate than people’s ability to consume it,” Marshall Manson, the paper’s author, said to AdAge for a March report.
Augmenting ads
To improve ad performance, Facebook representatives used to simply respond to businesses that flagged an issue, but its new approach will help its outreach efforts for customers whose ads aren’t performing well, AdAge reported.
“The challenge is how to get businesses to understand the value that’s there, since they weren’t paying for it at all and now they’re going to have to,” said Jim Donio, president of a New Jersey theater, according to the source.
Whether or not small business owners are focusing on Facebook advertisements to increase business, they could benefit from earning more working capital from alternative lenders such as National Funding. Greater ease of access and more flexible payment terms can help owners boost their advertising efforts whether online or in more traditional media.
