Visa to advertise small business service on Facebook

Visa is to pay £1 million ($2 million) to Facebook to advertise its small business service on the social networking site.

Visa, which is the world’s largest credit card network, is giving £51 ($100) advertising credits to the first 20,000 US start-ups that download its service via Facebook.

Facebook has grown in popularity over recent times and has a worldwide audience of 80 million people.

Visa’s objective is to tap into Facebook’s vast audience. Visa’s online service is designed to help small firms run their businesses more efficiently.

Approximately 80,000 small businesses already have profiles on Facebook and thousands of internet applications have been developed specifically for the social networking site.

However, most of these programmes are based on social activities including gaming, listening to music and picture-sharing, rather than commerce.

Facebook’s problem is that few programmes produce any revenue.

Dan Rose, vice-president of product development at Facebook, hopes that small businesses that receive the advertising credits will use the social networking site to advertise their services and products online in the future.

In related news earlier this year, figures showed the number of visitors to Facebook in Britain dropped from 8.9 million in December to 8.5 million in January.

The figures were announced as consumer magazine Which? warned that Facebook users were leaving themselves vulnerable to identity theft by posting their information online.

However, Alex Burmaster of Neilsen Online, the internet research company, the website is still the most visited social networking site in the UK.

Story link: Visa to advertise small business service on Facebook