Facebook now claims that 30 million small businesses with active Pages, up 5 million from November, as it looks to get more businesses spending money marketing on the social network.
Facebook 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 but previous figures put this at around 1 million.
The announcement comes as part of a “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.
That move is also an attempt to calm fears from small business that they are being pushed out of the social network’s user reach. Facebook is intentionally 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 an event in New York, which drew about 350 people.
“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.”
Looking ahead, Levy said his team’s focus will be on building more mobile tools for businesses. In fact, he said that 19 million of those small businesses with Pages are already active on mobile.