Facebook now has 1M active advertisers

Facebook announced today that the company now has one million active advertisers — companies or organizations that have advertised on the social network at least once in the last 28 days.

The company attributed that feat to small businesses, saying that this milestone is due in large part “to the small businesses growing their businesses online and in their local communities via Facebook.”

Apparently, small business does get social.

Facebook’s director of small business, Dan Levy, thanked those businesses:

I know business owners like these invest their hard earned money and time into running their companies. So today, on behalf of everyone at Facebook, I want to say thank you to them and to the over one million businesses like them who are active advertisers. You have chosen Facebook as a partner to grow your business. We appreciate the chance to work with you, and we celebrate your success.

Two months ago Facebook announced that there were two billion connections between local businesses and people in the site’s social graph, and in an average week, local business pages get more than 645 million views and 13 million comments. The company did not release new data on those points, but the up-to-date numbers are doubtless higher today.

With Facebook building ever-stronger connections between local businesses and their customers online — and an ever-growing wallet share of local advertising budgets — local search and recommendation engines such as Yelp and OpenTable and the tradition Internet Yellow Pages are potentially getting cut out of their traditional stomping grounds.

Facebook’s local ambitions are also challenging Google Local and Google Places, both of which collect data on local businesses and drive local advertising on Google, Google, Maps, and more for the search and advertising giant.

Photo credit: Andrea Costa Creative via photopin cc