With startups and small businesses turning towards online marketing as their primary form of advertisement, it is often a no brainer that they choose Facebook as their primary hub for reaching the most audience. Apart from the main Facebook app, this recent wave of online influencer-driven advertising has seen businesses turn to Instagram as well in order to capitalize on the prevalent hashtag trend. This has inspired the company to announce a new app that would enable businesses to manage their profiles across Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram-all in a single package.
Facebook calls this new platform the “Facebook Business Suite.” With this platform, the company will look to combine all necessary updates and notifications, allowing businesses to schedule posts, interact with customers, check page insights and also create advertisements to promote their products and services. The feature will allow users to check critical alerts from their profiles across both Instagram and Facebook, and will also enable them to save pre written replies to tend to frequently asked customer questions.
The Business Suite will require the user to have business accounts on both Facebook and Instagram linked to one another.Once linked, the user will see an option to join Business Suite on their page manager app, or if they wish to, the user can also access the option on their web browser at business.facebook.com.
For now, mobile users can expect to see a notification on their existing Pages Manager App to join the Business Suite instead. The company intends to launch a standalone app for the service, to be made available on both iOS and Android.
The company also aims to include another one of its popular networking application Whatsapp, to the Business Suite through a future update.
The social network giant has expressed its desire to come forward and help small businesses reach a wider audience pool, as the global pandemic has been critically difficult for them to sell their products and reach their target demographic. This is also because 2020 has been a tough year for advertising on Facebook, as the company faced a prolific industry wide ad ban due to some of its policies and their implementation (or lack of it).
However, the long term goal for the Business Suite is to empower all forms of business to grow, serve, and reach the maximum number of people possible, and is not limited by the scope of the pandemic.
Facebook in an insight post released on its website, has shed light on various studies carried out by different independent organizations that show how their new tool could benefit small businesses coming out of these troublesome times.
One such study that has been carried out by the monthly Global State of Small Business report, says, companies that tend to sell their products online are likely to see a higher rate of sale(almost 25%) in recent times and have a lesser number of employees laid off when compared to brick and mortar establishments. Another study sheds light upon the details of the impact of COVID 19 on the purchase patterns of customers and the benefits surrounding the use of digital tools.
The gruesome impact of the COVID 19 pandemic is felt worldwide by small and large businesses alike, with reports suggesting that there are a significant number of establishments that won’t even open for business post lockdown.
With all the ill effects and negativity encompassing the world during these turbulent times, Facebook expects its new tool, the Facebook Business Suite, to be of aid to small and medium businesses. Facebook expects the tool to give them an opportunity to reach out, network, and kickstart their businesses, as the world tries to get back on its feet, reeling from the effects of the pandemic.
