Across the country, millions of entrepreneurs are always on the lookout for ways they can continually improve their companies’ footprints in their communities. Now, it seems that more are deciding to pony up the money for social media advertising, which they might have previously considered to be too costly.
Over the last six months or so, the number of advertisers that were promoting their products or services on Facebook rose to about 2 million, up one-third from the 1.5 million seen in July, according to a report from Reuters. Of that number, the vast majority were small or medium businesses. However, that comes despite the fact that about 30 million small businesses have set up their own Facebook pages, and may therefore still represent a significant area of interest for the social network.
“Small business owners are really hard to reach and they are not tech savvy usually,” Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, told the news organization.
More data suggests growth
Perhaps not surprisingly, most companies are really only just now starting to dip a toe into the water of social media advertising, and among new sign-ups in the fourth quarter alone last year, about 80 percent paid to promote one of their standard posts, the report said. In general, those smaller companies tend to spend anywhere from $5 to $50 per day on such advertising, while larger firms will typically spend millions annually.
Overall, this is an area of real growth for Facebook, which has focused on drumming up revenues from advertisers for much of the last year, the report said. Now, the company sees about 7.8 percent of all online ad share go through its site, up from 5.8 percent in 2013. That still trails Google’s 31.1 percent considerably, and the search giant’s portion of the market is shrinking. The general consensus among experts is that Google probably doesn’t feel like it has to try as hard to attract business in this way, and continues to charge more than Facebook for ads with similar potential reach.
Owners who want to make sure they have the space in their budgets to properly market their products may want to consider the benefits of cutting costs in other ways, such as finding more affordable small business insurance, including policies for liability insurance. Doing so could potentially save as much as a few thousand dollars annually, which can then be devoted to other parts of the company.
