SMB’s on Facebook + App of the Week

It has just been reported that 12.8 million small businesses have a free-to-use Facebook Page, and 8 million use it monthly. Furthermore, by making advertising easier, Facebook got 300,000 of them to buy its new Promoted Posts ads – 25%, or 75,000 of them had never bought Facebook ads before. This news reveals that Facebook can indeed turn the long tail of businesses into spenders.

Mobile is also where users are consuming branded content on mobile. Cheryl Sandberg noted that 100,000 SMBs have tried out the Facebook Offers online coupon product. This is free but incentivizes businesses to buy ads to bring in fans they can share the offers with.

Expect Facebook to explore more ways to make its other traditional sidebar and Sponsored Story ads easier to use so it can get more SMBs on board. Even if it takes 1000 of them to equal the spend of a big brand, Facebook needs to monetize in every direction.

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New York-based startup Timehop is still digging through your old tweets, Facebook posts and Instagram photos to make you remember your past self. But now, it’s going a step further by encapsulating this into an attractive iPhone app and bringing a couple of new features along the way.

For example, the service now goes even further back in time. As social services get older, meaningful content from four, five or even eight years ago tends to get lost. Timehop now shows everything you did on this day ever since you started using Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter or the other services.

Indeed, with comments and likes, Timehop is set to become the social network of the past.