Facebook is announcing its 3rd-quarter financials today, and the conference call with investors included an update on how many small businesses have a Facebook business page.
The quote, which came from COO Sheryl Sandberg, was as follows:
12.8 million local businesses have a Facebook business page.
That’s a 16.4 percent increase from the 11 million SMB Facebook pages that the company reported just three months ago. At that time, I compared it to the eight million claimed Google Place Pages; I’m not aware of any new statistic from Google about how many SMBs have claimed their local listing, so it’s tough to compare. Google’s stat dates back to December 2011 … almost a year ago.
But if small business owners are creating new Facebook business pages at a 16.4 percent growth rate (quarter-to-quarter), that’s a pretty significant challenge for Google to grow the same with claimed Google+ Local Pages.
October 26, 2012 - 12:05 pm
Have you heard of any other reports on this topic (even from a third party) that show more data as to their activity? For example, it would be nice to know average number of page likes, how often they post, etc. A report like this could give some insight into how active these businesses are on Facebook. I assume a bunch of these business pages were created because someone told them that they should be on Facebook and later the pages were abandoned.
November 3, 2012 - 12:43 pm
I still always surprised that Facebook has more local pages then Google Places.
November 13, 2012 - 7:59 am
I believe it is essential for all businesses to have a facebook page. With so many users of the social networking site it is a great way for companies to get themselves seen by potentially thousands of users.
December 3, 2012 - 3:26 pm
“12.8 million local businesses have a Facebook business page”
Can you clarify that this stat includes “non-operated” community pages? Or does it refer to only “business operated” pages that businesses have created manually or claimed?
If the latter – then its a fair comparison to Google “claimed” pages.