Just as Google+ has been busy shutting down company profile accounts for violating their user policy, Facebook announced Tuesday its launch of Facebook for Business (facebook.com/business), a webpage that provides directions for how to use the social network’s organization-centric resources.
As Colleen Taylor at GigaOm reports, Facebook for Business does not include any new features. Instead, it simply makes it easier for business to use the wide variety of social networking services that have long been available to them through Facebook.
“Facebook allows small businesses to create rich social experiences, build lasting relationships and amplify the most powerful type of marketing — word of mouth,” a Facebook spokesperson told GigaOm via email. “We created Facebook.com/business to make it even easier for people to reach these objectives and grow.”
The services Facebook provides to businesses include: pages, which are user profiles for organizations; advertisements, which appear in a sidebar on users’ profiles; sponsored stories, which are a different kind of ad that appears in a user’s News Feed when one of their friends “likes’ a business’ page; and platform, which helps businesses create Facebook apps and use the site’s social plugins.
While none of these services are news in and of themselves, Facebook’s timing for launching the new business help section certainly appears to be a hit back at Google, which has stolen the social networking spotlight in recent weeks, despite its decidedly mismanaged rollout of business profiles on Google+.
Neither the launch of Facebook for Business nor Google+’s sluggish handling of business profiles will likely have much affect on the long-term battle for social networking dominance. Google+ is certainly growing at an impressive rate — it is estimated to have passed 20 million users in under 30 days — but Facebook remains leagues larger, with 750 million users in its ranks, most of whom are probably not paying much attention to any of these minor corporate spats.
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