As part of National Small Business Week, Facebook recently released new tools to make it easier for smaller companies to manage and promote their products and services across the social networks. These new tools include running automated ad campaigns, booking appointments, and editing videos.

Automated Ads

Automated Ads creates ads that can run across Instagram and Facebook. Campaigns are built in four steps: First, small businesses can use existing images and business pages. The best part is that you can customize these to specific business goals.

Facebook pulls in small businesses’ Instagram and Facebook images. The SMB picks 6 from these. After that, the business picks a target market they can edit later. There’s also a suggested marketing plan and ongoing optimization.

Overall, Automated Ads are a smart way of creating effective ads for your business that can run on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Audience Network.

Also, Automated Ads have some tremendous advantages, among which are:

• A suggested budget: They provide some recommended budget based on your goals.

• Ad versions: You can automatically create up to 6 various versions of your ad. Taking into account the information from your profile, it provides you with some recommendations or audience options.

• Notifications: You’ll be now informed about your ads performance.

• Appointments: Service-based small businesses will want to pay attention to this.Appointments allow you to accept and handle customer information. Customers click the “book now” button to choose services. They can make the appointments right on the Facebook or Instagram page. As well, they can connect to a different site or have a Messenger conversation.

With the new ‘manage appointments’ feature, businesses can:

– Accept appointments online
– Send reminders to customers through Messenger or text message
– Customize a list of services
– Add hours of availability
– Sync appointments with a personal calendar or another appointment management tool

• Video Editing

Editing videos is now also simpler with three new video editing tools: automatic cropping, video trimming, and image and text overlays. Overall, these new tools are designed to make the lives of business owners easier. Now they can simply and quickly edit video so they can get back to managing a business.

According to Facebook’s internal data, the platform is home to over 90 million small businesses as of January 2019. Facebook remains dedicated to improving the experience for this vital user base.