Facebook offers platform to help Philippines SMES expand

MANILA, Philippines — Facebook has given small and medium enterprises a platform to grow their businesses through social media tools that provide training to these entrepreneurs.

John Rubio, Philippine country director for Facebook, said the company has been helping SMEs thrive through education programs that will give them the tools they need to succeed, as well as efforts to unlock growth for large businesses as they embrace mobile strategies.

“Businesses are embarking on the journey to digital transformation with the aim of unlocking growth opportunities and to better connect with today’s mobile-savvy Filipinos. In the Philippines alone, more than 50 million Filipinos are connected to an SME business page on Facebook,” Rubio said.

As part of its initiatives to help SMEs, Facebook has partnered with Bayan Academy and the Department of Trade and Industry to provide digital marketing workshops for SMEs, aimed at helping them grow their businesses online.

Facebook has conducted seminars for over 1,700 SMEs in seven cities since 2017. Facebook is expanding these training sessions to reach more entrepreneurs in 25 cities across the Philippines in 2018.

“We’d like to scale more and more. We wanted to start small, identify what ’s needed to do, so we hit a couple of close to 2,000 people with 25 different workshops,” Rubio told reporters.

“So we want to accelerate that, this year we’re targeting 5, 000 entrepreneurs. We want to hit more entrepreneurs, giving them tools,“ Rubio said.

On the international front, Rubio said they are also focused on helping businesses connect with the 130 million people living outside the Philippines who are already connected to an SME on Facebook based in the Philippines.

“For large businesses, we also want to help them realize untapped potential across all touch points – from strategic partnership and insights, to conversational commerce on Messenger, to hands-on workshops and education,” Rubio added.

Meanwhile, Messenger is helping evolve the ways businesses interact, respond and get real-time feedback from their customers in the Philippines.

“For large Philippine businesses, Facebook is doubling down its efforts to help them address challenges in implementing digital strategies to embrace a mobile future and evolve their organizations,” the company said.

Facebook is also helping Filipino companies evolve the way they collaborate through Workplace by Facebook. Employees at Meralco, Philippine Savings Bank (PSBank) and 7-Eleven are connecting on one platform, creating more efficient workflows and collaborating better. In turn, this helps them build a stronger company culture and enables employees to be more productive and feel connected to their companies.

Moreover, Facebook is also targeting to help empower women entrepreneurs through its #SheMeansBusiness initiative, which it has partnered with Connected Women and the Department of Information and Communications Technology(DICT), to empower women entrepreneurs with knowledge, training, technology and a network of peers for support. The initiative was launched in 2016, and has since been extended to seven cities in the country, and has reached more than 500 women entrepreneurs.