Facebook to stand by small businesses

Facebook yesterday said one of its main goals is to support growing businesses, especially small entrepreneurs who are selling products and services in a limited way but have the potential to hit the global market.

At a daylong programme – APAC Press Day – at Facebook’s Singapore office, senior executives of the social media platform said a lot of small and medium entrepreneurs have unique business ideas but they don’t have budgets to afford traditional media for campaigns.

Facebook is promoting the businesses across the globe, they said.

Karen Teo, vice-president and head of the Asia-Pacific global business group at Facebook, said globally 140 million businesses are taking support from Facebook at present. The social media platform is promoting local entrepreneurs so that they can explore opportunities internationally.

Referring to a survey, she said one out of three business owners is in the Asia-Pacific region and seven of 10 women business owners are using Facebook as a platform to grow.

“These women have a positive outlook about the future business and they are growing faster,” Teo said.

In an interview with The Daily Star, James Tan, product marketing director for the region at Facebook, said countries like Bangladesh are part of their plan.

Earlier in the day, Dan Neary, vice president for the Asia-Pacific business group at the social networking site, said the social media platform is working on lots of new things prioritising local businesses.

According to Neary, Facebook Pay and Calibra, a payment solution and a digital wallet respectively, will lead the market in the coming days.

Calibra is a Facebook subsidiary whose goal is to provide financial services that will let people access and participate in the Libra network. The first product Calibra will introduce is a digital wallet for Libra, a new global currency powered by blockchain technology.

The wallet will be available in Messenger, WhatsApp and as a standalone app and may be launched in 2020. Facebook Pay is being rolled out on Facebook and Messenger in the US for fundraising, in-game purchase, event ticketing, and person-to-person payments.

“Currently, 1.7 billion people do not have access to financial services and we are targeting this huge number of people,” Neary added.

In various presentations, Facebook showed that messaging platforms are growing worldwide than open platforms and that’s why Facebook is developing messaging business platforms using WhatsApp and Messenger in various countries.

Facebook has launched the business service in 11 countries in the Asia-Pacific and gradually it will be made available in other markets. According to Facebook officials, e-commerce has become social commerce in the region.

“We are giving connectivity to entrepreneurs and using that, social commerce is also evolving,” said Christine Chia, director for commerce partnerships for the region.

James Tan also said apart from promoting businesses, Facebook is also fighting terrorism and social crimes.

It removed 1.72 billion fake accounts from Facebook and taken down 6.2 million contents related to suicide and self-injury from Instagram, a photo and video-sharing social networking service owned by Facebook, in the third quarter this year. It also removed 1.5 million drug sales-related contents from Instagram.

Facebook will organise 2 million trainings in 2020 to restrict target harassment.