September 9, 2016
Facebook is trying to help small businesses become global businesses with some new tweaks to its advertising platforms.
On Thursday, the company announced that it's offering businesses with Facebook pages the chance to easily reach international audiences on the social network and will offer suggestions about which country to take their business to next.
"More than 1 billion people on Facebook are connected to a small business in another country," Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, said in a statement to The Post. "As technology brings the world closer, it can also help businesses grow."
Sandberg posted about the feature on her personal page, weaving in some personal background about her great-grandparents' paint store in New York, and the traditional limits of small-business ownership. "Over time they grew their business, attracting new customers through word of mouth and local marketing," she said of her forebears. "But they never would have imagined reaching customers internationally."
Facebook's new tool is, however, aimed at doing just that: providing the tools to help mom-and-pop stores the chance to reach a much wider audience.
Businesses can use the new feature by going to Facebook's Lookalike Audiences tool, which recommended new audiences to business owners in their own countries but will now also offer information on international audiences.
That saves small-business owners some time, by offering a shortcut through the arduous process of market research. Right now, businesses have to guess which countries may have audiences that match their businesses and then manually find audiences in those countries. Facebook's tool aims to flip that process and, therefore, make it more efficient.
Facebook has also updated its location-targeting tools to allow business owners to serve ads to a worldwide region or trade zone, and then will automatically adjust the campaign to serve ads to the countries that offer the best return.
Courtesy by Gadgets 360.com
