Facebook says three million companies worldwide – the vast majority of them small and medium businesses – are now advertising on the social media platform, representing a 50% increase from last year.
Approximately 70% of the social media giant’s advertising partners are from outside the U.S., with the company identifying South East Asia as the fastest-growing region.
Facebook said more than 50 million small businesses are currently using its free Pages product to promote and grow their company; services, local commerce and ecommerce comprise the top three verticals.
Small businesses are also increasingly mobile, with more than 1 million advertisers creating an ad from a mobile device and more than 20 million Pages users using the Pages Manager app.
Facebook said there are more than 43 billion connections between people and businesses, including an estimated 2.5 billion comments on Pages each month. It said more than 1 billion of its users are connected to at least one business; in the U.S, more than 80% of its users are connected to a small business.
The company has also announced the launch of a new tool called Your Business Story, a movie-making tool that enables businesses to upload photos from their Page and overlay the images with music before sharing with followers.
Facebook reported a 57% year-over-year increase in advertising revenues for the three months ended Dec. 31, with worldwide revenues topping US$5.6 billion. Approximately 80% of its revenue is derived from mobile, up from 69% in the year-earlier period.
According to eMarketer, Facebook’s share of global digital advertising will increase to 12% – US$186.81 billion – this year, up from 10.7% in 2015 (by contrast, Twitter’s share is pegged at 1.4%). The research company is also calling for Facebook to control 17.7% of global mobile ad revenues – US$102.57 billion – this year, down from 18.7% in 2014.
The company is also predicting Facebook’s global user base will reach 1.41 billion people this year, 1.2 billion (85.5%) of which will access the service via mobile device.
