Facebook announced Wednesday it now has 3 million businesses who are active advertisers, a 50 percent jump in one year. The vast majority are small businesses, and 70 percent of those businesses are outside the U.S., it said.
Fifty-million small businesses use pages on Facebook, making more than 43 billion connections with people and businesses. In the U.S., over 80 percent of people on Facebook are connected to a small business. And Facebook says there's plenty of room to grow: 35 percent of small businesses in the U.S. have no online presence.
"We think small businesses are coming to Facebook because Facebook works," said Dan Levy, Facebook's head of small and medium businesses. "This makes Facebook one of the biggest communities of small businesses worldwide."
Levy said that the more advertisers the company gets on its platform, the more targeted its ads can be, which is a win-win. "To the extent we can show them content that's more relevant to them, it's better for the person using Facebook, it's better for the advertisers. We want to be the best minute and dollar a small business spends every day."
Facebook also said it has created a new movie tool, called 'Your Business Story' to make it easy for business owners to showcase their companies. "It's a fun tool, similar to 'Lookback' videos — businesses can choose a few images from their page, set them to music, and can post it or promote it on their page," Levy said.
Facebook's growth has been helped by ease of use for its free and paid services. More than 1 million advertisers create ads directly from mobile devices, and the company says over 20 million active pages use Facebook's Pages Manager App.