Facebook announced this week that more than 5 million businesses are advertising on the social network each month. That’s up from 4 million monthly advertisers in September 2016 and 3 million in March 2016.
Big brand advertisers make up much of the ad spend, but to attract small businesses, Facebook has a set of tools such as audience targeting, a mobile design studio and online courses available so far in 10 languages.
Recent changes driving the increase in advertisers include a “one click” option in Facebook’s ads manager to reinstate high-performing ads.
In an interview with Reuters, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said that the number of ad buyers was an important milepost, showing that Facebook has room to grow despite its massive scale. Facebook’s 5 million advertisers are just 8% of the 65 million businesses that are active on the network.
Among the 5 million advertisers, some 75 percent of them are outside the United States, and its fastest-growing markets are India, Thailand, Brazil, Mexico and Argentina, the company said.