Facebook and Instagram are enhancing the support they offer to SME advertisers, especially those on mobile, with the launch of new enhancements to the Ads Manager App. You can find out more here. The new Mobile Studio feature will help SMEs test the efficacy of ads.
As they say of the improvements: “We’re also committed to helping you improve the performance of your adverts. The app now recommends actions you can take to increase advert performance – and makes it easy for you to do so in one click. For example, we’ll notify you when a high-performing advert (compared to your other similar adverts) is about to end and give you a one-click option to extend the schedule for another one, three or seven days.”
Apparently 5 million businesses advertise on Facebook, but 65 million companies have Pages to showcase goods and engage with customers. Facebook division Instagram say it has one million paying advertisers and eight million companies using business profiles. They don’t break down the nature of these companies but the majority are likely to be SMEs.
Olly Sewell of Facebook says of the developments: “For any company, it’s about ROI. We don’t say ‘you should make returns on X to grow’. Start small and start getting results, once you see that, then you can start expanding budget. The beauty is we’re seeing large and small firms see success. Facebook is a community of people and business, connecting for more than 13 years. We want to help build and empower business. We’ve invested in simple solutions to help small businesses grow.”
We’d be especially interested in hearing from any marketplace sellers who have had genuine success on Facebook or Instagram. Do you advertise there?
One Response
We use Facebook for our business. It is clear and cost effective, unlike the likes of twitter (this is why Facebook makes money and Twitter does not. They are always adding new features to our page and we are constantly running a brand awareness ad at present.
Again UK market is a tough nut, but it has really helped our EU sales and improved margins as it has taken away sales from marketplaces, we do not advertise marketplace offerings on Facebook, just our own site.
We even had someone from Facebook actually phone us out the blue and really help us with delivery our ads (and explain things in plain English). However when there is an issue they need a dedicated support contact as there help pages are poor. They also need to get a grip with the “music” bot thing, we do everything with video it is a cross your fingers when posting it, total nightmare actually lot of issues.
Facebook right now seems to be the only BIG business thathas a good offering out their for small business. Am sure some sort of fee is one the way but till then we will make hay while the sun shines.