Facebook: Businesses have paid for 2.5 million promoted posts
The social network says more than 300,000 Pages have shelled out the dough to promote their posts to fans.
Facebook released some new numbers today for its local business Pages, revealing that about 2 percent of the Pages have used promoted posts.
The social network said it's reached 13 million local Pages now -- up from the 12.8 million last reported during its earnings call in October -- and 300,000 of those have promoted more than 2.5 million posts. Promoted posts are ones that Pages pay for to make sure they reach more of their Facebook fans.
According to a Facebook representative, Facebook Director of Global SMB Markets Dan Levy went over some of these new numbers at the BIA/Kelsey's Interactive Local Media West Conference in Los Angeles.
Facebook's change to its News Feed algorithm earlier this year brought on some scrutinyover whether promoted posts are worth the money, and worse, rumors saying Facebook was intentionally making it more difficult to reach fans. The social network had to call a press conference to explain that it was just taking care of spam.
Facebook may be sharing some numbers to show that there are still businesses that find its services valuable.
According to the numbers released today, 150 million people visit Facebook Pages daily, with half of them visiting through mobile devices. Over 3 million Page owners use Facebook's mobile advertisement management app, which launched six months ago, to buy their promoted posts.
The social network also boasts that the number of pages advertising on the social network has nearly doubled since January. Active local Pages, a Page a business uses at least once a month, have increased by 40 percent. But Facebook isn't saying how many Pages or active Pages existed in January.
This means we don't know exactly how quickly the number of Pages has grown in the last year, or how many new small businesses were willing to jump on the bandwagon.