How Facebook is helping more SMEs in the Philippines

A HIGHER number of small to medium enterprises in the Philippines can now grow their businesses with the help of Facebook, which is rolling out investments and training to help them strive further.

Philippine country director for Facebook, John Rubio, said the company has been offering education programmes that would help the SMEs while large businesses were assisted to unlock growth as they embrace mobile strategies, Philstar reported.

“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 was quoted as saying.

Partnering with Bayan Academy and the Department of Trade and Industry, Facebook is providing digital workshops for the SMEs which is aimed at helping them grow their businesses online.

Since 2017, Facebook has conducted seminars for over 1,700 SMEs. The company plans to expand the training sessions in 25 cities across the country this year.

“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 said.

“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 Facebook was also focussed on helping to serve as a bridge for the businesses to connect with over 130 million people living outside the Philippines who were connected to a SMEs in the Philippines via the social networking site.

“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,” he said.

Facebook said its Messenger feature is helping evolve the ways businesses interact with their customers, enabling them to obtain real-time feedback.

“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.

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