05 August 2016, USA :
Facebook will allow emerging market companies to promote, sell for free through their Facebook pages, the social media company said on Wednesday, marking a new effort to build up potential advertisers in its fastest-growing regions.
The move is Facebook’s latest foray onto online commerce in emerging markets. The company launched a service last year allowing some merchants to sell items through paid ads on Facebook’s app. The latest service will instead be free, and users can view products through merchants’ own Facebook pages.
By making sellers more reliant on Facebook, the company hopes that more businesses in emerging markets will eventually decide to become paying advertisers.
“If a business is seeing value from their page, there is a higher opportunity that they could be an advertiser,” said Benji Shomair, product marketing director of Facebook Pages, in an interview.
“Our business is growing at a healthy rate,” Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told a conference call, noting that the company has strategic plans for the next five and 10 years. “Our results show our progress in our goal of making the world more open and connected.”
The social media platform’s recent Q2 earnings beat expectations on both earnings and revenue, with earnings of 97 cents per share and revenue of $6.44 billion. Analysts predicted earnings of 81 cents per share and $6 billion in revenue. Facebook also added 60 million new users, bringing its total to 1.71 billion users, compared to analyst predictions of 1.69 billion.
