Facebook has been laying it on thick trying to convince small businesses to advertise to its members. It developed a slick desktop interface to tempt owners of Facebook pages to upgrade from regular posts to promoted posts, for example, then it upgraded its mobile pages app to sell ads in a similar fashion.
Now comes a survey that helps explain why Facebook is so eager to court small businesses. Mom and pops overwhelmingly prefer Facebook over other social networks, but they’ve also overwhelmingly kept their wallets closed, according to targeting firm Reply in an email survey of 3,434 small business owners affiliated with MerchantCircle.
Some 69 percent of survey respondents say they use Facebook to promote their small business, compared with 49 percent for Google+ and 33 percent for Twitter. Presumably, they're using Facebook's free "pages" feature, which lets businesses and prominent individuals set up Facebook outposts that members can "like" and follow. But only 7 percent of the surveyed small businesses say they pay Facebook for promotional services, such as having a "page" post shown to more members; 74 percent decline to pay any social network any amount whatsoever. These numbers do not include business who have not joined an online network like MerchantCircle, but those businesses are presumably even less likely to be enthusiastic about Facebook ads.
Facebook has been rolling out an ever-more-sophisticated array of advertising products, trying to entice businesses to target Facebook users who are on mobile phones, who are shopping online, and who are downloading iPhone apps. In the end, however, it looks from the MerchantCircle survey like the biggest constraint on its growth may not be the speed of its own technological development, but the rate at which potential advertisers bring their old-line businesses into the 21st century.
