We couldn’t think of a better place to spend National Small Business Week than our nation’s capital for our latest small business training program, Boost with Facebook. To celebrate the week, we announced new products that will help the 90 million small businesses on Facebook.
We’ve added these new solutions to help small businesses save time and resources so they can focus on growth:
- Automated Ads takes the guesswork out of buying ads on Facebook, creating the right advertising plan for each business in a few easy steps. Based on the business’ goals, this tool uses the existing images from their business page and lets business owners “set it and forget it” to make it even more simple for them to advertise and focus on other aspects of their business.
- Appointment Bookings expands Facebook’s free tools for small businesses to effectively manage their time. With this new tool, service-based businesses on Facebook and Instagram can now accept and manage appointments, customer information and send appointment reminders — all from their phone.
- New video creative tools help small businesses build eye-catching video for mobile in just minutes.
We believe in empowering small businesses through our free and paid solutions to help more people launch and grow businesses, which translates to real impact for their communities and local economies. According to the SBA, 98.2% of businesses in Washington, DC are small businesses and together they employ more than 240,000 people.
Beyond adding more tools, we also want to help make sure business owners in the District — and around the country — have the digital skills they need to take their businesses to the next level. That’s why all of the sessions at our DC Boost with Facebook event, hosted at Union Market, are free and open to anyone who wants to join.
Attendees will hear from local business leaders making a difference right here in Washington, DC through the use of digital tools. And we’ll offer classes on everything from getting started on Facebook and Instagram to optimizing your content for mobile and the audiences you want to reach across platforms. We’ll even have our top experts on hand to answer technical questions in a one-on-one setting.
Through events like this one, we’re making progress towards our goal of training 1 million people in the US in digital skills by 2020. We hope these new tools and training programs make it easier for small businesses on our platform to focus on what’s most important: growing their businesses.
To learn more about the free tools, resources and advertising options we offer small businesses, check out our new small business resource hub at facebook.com/boost.