Small businesses advertising on Facebook

Research has revealed that small businesses are using Facebook to try and promote their services.

While the social network has been offering ad space for sometime now, it appears that smaller companies are only recently taking advantage of the option in a bid to drum up business and avoid closure in difficult trading periods.

Conducted by Payvment, the study looked at more than 100,000 companies and individuals who are selling on Facebook and found that they had largely enjoyed positive results from their advertisements on the site.

Christian Taylor, Payvment founder and chief executive, commented: “There are hundreds of thousands of small businesses who are successfully selling products on Facebook.”

He added that the trend was in contrast to larger businesses, which have mostly been scaling back or retracting their advertising spend on Facebook. This isn't the case with small business, of which two in every five are using Facebook Ads.

It was also shown that Mark Zuckerberg's site was the preferred social network for this group of companies, with many people using groups and conversations as well as advertising to engage with potential customers.