Facebook kicked off its summer small business bootcamp tour today in New York and announced that the global total of active small business Facebook Pages is 30 million.
That’s up 5 million from the last time it reported that stat last November. New this time: the social network said nearly two-thirds of those pages — 19 million — are being managed using mobile devices, “a testament to the growing importance of a mobile marketing presence.”
There was no mention of total advertisers on the Facebook platform so we can assume that that figure remains at 1 million.
The “Facebook Fit” bootcamp campaign, which has stops in Miami, Chicago, Austin and Menlo Park later in the summer, is intended to help small business owners and employees more effectively use the platform as a marketing tool. And, of course, Facebook wants to encourage more businesses to become advertisers.
That push has been a sore spot for some SMBs, who believe Facebook is purposefully lowering organic reach to force them to pay to reach customers that they formerly communicated with for free.
Dan Levy, Facebook’s small business director, addressed the issue at today’s event in New York, which drew about 350 people according to AdAge.
“The organic reach issue is not about us making more money,” Levy told Time magazine. “The natural extension of Facebook becoming popular and people having more friends and liking more Pages is there’s just more and more stories to choose from every day. We have to choose which ones are going to keep them engaged on Facebook.”
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