As a small business, it can be challenging to get noticed in the sea of other businesses. How can you make yourself heard and seen by your target audience?

Facebook announced during Small Business Week 2019 three new key features for small businesses to gain traction.

Facebook has always been a great platform to advertise businesses because of the 2.4 billion active monthly users. And now it’s even easier to use.

Here are the brand-new features for small business to take off with!

Automated Advertisements

Instead of just making a regular ad, now you can automatically create multiple versions of an ad. Up to six different ads can run across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Audience Network.

How does it work?

Well, this new tool provides users with some questions regarding their business and the overall objective and goal of the ad. It uses this information and creates useful suggests for Call to Action (CTA) buttons, keyword text suggestions and other creative details specific to your company’s Facebook Page.

Automated ads will save people time and effort to change the advertisements for each platform.

Embedded Appointment Bookings

Across all Facebook owned platforms, you can now embed appointment booking software.

This feature allows for customers to automatically book your services without you personally having to talk to them!

It is completely customizable for your business’ services. You can display your availability and manage any and all appointments directly. This could even go hand-in-hand with the Facebook Messenger Bots. The bots can handle the bookings too!

It’s a free service already built into Facebook. This could be an excellent option for those who haven’t already invested in a third-party appointment booking service.

Video Editing Tool

Video is the biggest drivers of engagement by far for Facebook advertisements. These posts actually get about 59% more engagement than other types of posts.

Is it time to roll of the DSLR cameras and sound board? What if you don’t have these things?

Small businesses might not have the budget for a whole production team to shoot and edit advertisements. And that’s okay, Facebook now has you covered!

The new video editing tools released by Facebook now gives the opportunity to crop, trim and add overlays to videos. For each ad, it automatically crops and trims to the correct lengths for different platforms.

While the features don’t replace the flexibility of editing software, such as Adobe Premiere, it allows for small edits to be made quickly. Some text or logo overlay may just be all you need.

The Future of Facebook for Small Businesses

So why should we care about this new update from Facebook?

Facebook is really pushing for accessibility to the resources they offer. In 2019 alone, Facebook plans to run over 200 training events.

Their goal is to train as many small entrepreneurs’ digital skills needed for the business world today. There will be online and offline events hosted to educate the masses.

Combined with Facebook’s other tools, such as the Pixel, businesses with smaller audiences can get a farther reach. An example would be using the Custom Audience tool for retargeting viewers who have watched your videos. You can provide different ads to those who watched more than 50% of the video. It allows for a better conversion rate at a lower cost.

Facebook hopes that this update, as well as the additional Blueprint courses, will help those who lack the technological resources and the budgets to get off their feet.