Facebook Announces SMB Video Offering & 3-Million-Advertiser Milestone

Facebook has announced a new montage-video product for small businesses, Your Business Story. In the same post, Facebook casually mentioned that the company now has three million advertisers.

Your Business Story is a video production tool that enables local businesses to combine still images and music to quickly create videos:

To celebrate the businesses that use Facebook to grow, we created Your Business Story — a tool that makes it easy to create a video that shows what your business brings to the world. Because we believe the best way to tell the story of three million businesses is to empower each one to share their own.

Your Business Story is similar to the earlier-announced “SlideShow” offering that Facebook introduced for video ad creation in developing markets on slow mobile connections (i.e., 2G). In announcing Your Business Story, Facebook didn’t say anything about ads. I suspect, however, it will ultimately work its way into Facebook Ads.

The three-million active advertiser number is up from the last reported figure, which was 2.5 million in September. In February 2015, the company said it had two million advertisers. Before that, in June of 2013, Facebook had one million advertisers. For the past year or so, Facebook has added roughly half a million advertisers every six months.

In its press materials associated with the announcement, the company said that the “vast majority” of its advertisers are small businesses. It also reported that “50 million small businesses now use Pages on Facebook.” This is up from 45 million in September.