Facebook’s New Insight On How SMBs Use Mobile

During Facebook’s Q1 earnings call with analysts, the executive team dug into one area of its business that it’s been paying more attention to in the past year: SMBs.

Specifically, how to foster SMBs into its (free) Pages for businesses. Of course, Facebook has business intentions for its own (paid) tools and advertisement in order to turn businesses of all sizes into a meaningful part of its revenue flow.

“SMBs … we think, are a very core competitive advantage for us. It’s prohibitively expensive for most small businesses to reach people digitally,” Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said during the earnings call with analysts, citing some key stats.

“Thirty-five percent of small businesses in the United States … don’t have a Web presence at all. And setting up a mobile app, getting people to find and download a mobile app, can be even more expensive,” she noted.

Instead, what Facebook is seeing is that SMBs are turning toward Facebook Pages as their mobile solution to reach consumers. As Sandberg pointed out, those Pages are free, easy to set up and offer the same user experience for the business owner as a personal page.

“The onboarding has been incredibly important and incredibly effective,” Sandberg said.

There are more than 50 million SMB Pages active on a monthly basis, and 80 percent of them are active on mobile, she said, which is where Facebook sees potential in its products to get those users to become customers. On Facebook alone, there are 3 million active advertisers and 200,000 on Instagram.

What you see that’s interesting is that SMBs are able to use some of the same tools as some of the largest brands in the world. Over 2 million SMBs have posted a video — both paid and organic — in the last month,” Sandberg said.

For attracting SMBs, it’s not just about just getting them to use the platforms; it’s about getting them to use the tools to measure their own results, she said. And that’s why Facebook offers the tools it does in order to help SMBs build toward their own goals.

“We continue to be very bullish on this channel because we have such a broad base of usage, because that usage is so active and because we’re very focused on investing in simplifying our products so that all SMBs can use them,” Sandberg said.

Because of this, Facebook’s plan is to help smaller businesses act more like big businesses by leveling the playing field as to how they can reach consumers. There’s also Facebook Messenger, which businesses are using to interact with consumers, a service that now has more than 900 million active users.

Overall, on Facebook’s mobile side, there are an average of 989 million mobile daily active users, which is a 24 percent YOY increase. Mobile monthly active users hit 1.51 billion, an increase of 21 percent from the year prior. In general, daily active users increased 16 percent to 1.09 billion users, and monthly active users increased 21 percent to 1.5 billion users.

Mobile advertising revenue represented approximately 82 percent of advertising revenue during Q1, which was up from 73 percent of advertising revenue in the first quarter of 2015. This shows why Facebook is turning more and more toward its business and marketing audience to build its revenues.