Facebook’s New Features Are Meant To Help Small Businesses See More “Virtual Foot Traffic”

Facebook has rolled out new features specifically intended to help small businesses “see more virtual foot traffic as they move online to stay open.”

“As many stores remain closed and social media serves as an online Main Street, the shift to doing business online is more urgent than ever,” the social network wrote in an official blog post.

To drive traffic on this digital Main Street, Facebook is launching a new discovery tool called Businesses Nearby, which lets users see all recent posts from businesses close to them. (Or a little farther away: Per TechCrunch, you can choose to search for businesses as close as one mile, or as far as 500 miles.) The section also displays stores’ current hours and pickup/delivery options, and lets users make appointments or direct-message them.

That brings us to Facebook’s second update: Messenger is getting a significant tweak.

Prior to the change, Facebook users who are also administrators on business Pages could only access messages sent to those Pages through a special inbox. But the update allows administrators to add businesses’ messages to their own Messenger app or window.

As you can see in this mockup from Facebook, admins are now able to enter Messenger and select either their personal profile or business Page. Selecting the business Page gives them access to their organization’s inbox, so they can read, reply to, and delete messages without being actually on the Page:

Facebook has also added a handful of new ways for users to shout out local businesses. Its core website has a new hashtag—#SupportSmallBusiness—and subsidiary Instagram has a matching “Support Small Business” sticker. If someone uses the sticker in their Instagram Story, that post will be added to a collective Story, Facebook wrote, “so their followers can see it along with other businesses that people they follow are supporting.”

Additionally, the company is adding an “in support of” tag to Facebook intended to let users tag local businesses’ Pages. (So, if you’re posting about a great sourdough starter you got from an independent pizza place, you can toss in an “in support of” tag to call out the restaurant’s Page.)

Last up, Facebook has added hubs of real-time info about the pandemic to businesses’ backend dashboards on both Facebook and Instagram. Hubs contain “COVID-19-related information, business tools and best practices,” per Facebook.

All these features are now live across Facebook and Instagram, the company tells Tubefilter.

This is not Facebook’s first effort to support small businesses impacted by the pandemic. In March, it launched an emergency grant program, pledging to give out $100 million in cash and ad credits to small businesses in need. Then, in April, it began letting small business owners create fundraisers for their companies on Facebook main, and updated Instagram to feature gift card sales and online food orders on businesses’ profiles.