American Express: A Facebook Success Story | Facebook for Business# Facebook Ads,

How do you create a national movement? See how American Express brought Small Business Saturday to life on Facebook, driving sales to SMB's across America.

our mission with small business saturday
was very simple we just wanted people
shop at a small business over two-thirds
of every dollar spent in a local
business goes back to the local
community and we thought that was so
profound it's something we wanted to
shout from the mountaintops when we
talked to our cardmembers you know they
would say to us you know the thing I
hate most about this downturn is seeing
a store on my main street that's been
boarded up we came up with the idea of
creating a day during the holiday season
where we could be encouraging consumers
to go spend their time their money with
small businesses and the first place
that we all agreed was most important
was gonna be Facebook local businesses
exist on facebook consumers spent an
enormous amount of time on Facebook
they're engaged the facebook community
really came together and said I believe
in supporting local businesses they
shared stories about businesses that
they loved your favorite pizza place
your favorite bike shop not only were we
able to get a fan base of a million and
a half people on Facebook supporting and
liking Small Business Saturday but when
you think about their friend base you
know we're talking about over a hundred
million people being aware of Small
Business Saturday and we don't know any
other way that we could have scaled that
level of awareness and that level of
engagement over two and a half week
period and it really gave us an
appreciation for the potency of Facebook
we had tremendous awareness among the
general population in a neighborhood of
forty percent the small businesses
involved in the effort so a twenty-eight
percent increase in their business
versus that same day a year before for
total retail there was a nine percent
increase so this was a three-fold
increase versus what total retail was
able to see that certainly made an
impact your Facebook's is a young
company you know here you have a company
that's only existed for a few years
and you've got another company called
American Express that's been around for
a hundred and sixty-one years and yet
the ability of these two companies to
partner together was pretty amazing to
be part of and that's the kind of
partnership that you want when you're
developing something as grand as trying
to inspire a nation Facebook continues
to be the heart of our community it is
not a optional piece of the equation it
is an essential piece of the equation
the possibilities that we can imagine at
this point are infinite I got a number
of phone calls at home about small
business saturday from people that I
knew that are small business owners and
saying thank you you don't always get to
work on a project that you really feel
like you're making a difference for an
entire community

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