Social media company Facebook announced plans to tap into the lucrative small business market in order to achieve its goal of increasing advertising revenue by getting more clicks on ads.

Facebook’s operating chief Sheryl Sandberg said the company will attempt to show small business owners how they can reach more customers and raise their revenue by creating pages on Facebook and by buying ads that will appear on their target customers’ Facebook pages.

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To achieve this goal, Sandberg said Facebook will conduct workshops in five cities in the United States in order to give small business owners an idea of how to tap Facebook as a marketing tool and reach a wider, even global market. The workshops are part of the Facebook Fit campaign.

Sandberg told the Associated Press that majority of small businesses do not have enough customers and Facebook is ready to show them how to solve that problem.

Digital companies such as Facebook, Google and Yahoo have found it hard to crack the small business market because many owners are reluctant to advertise online because they are “just small”.

Facebook earlier announced that its site is used by 25 million small business owners around the world. However, experts said Facebook and Google only make a small revenue from these user segment.

Sandberg said Facebook has already updated its technology to make it more friendly and easy to use for small business owners. She said small business owners who do not have enough time to sit down to use their personal computers can now use their mobile phones to update their Facebook pages or ads.

Experts said small business owners do not go to social media to advertise, unaware that they can start promoting their products or services online for only US$10 on Facebook. That’s something they were not able to do in the past, Sandberg said.

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