Facebook and Instagram announce new tools to help communities connect with their local businesses

Facebook and Instagram are today announcing new ways for people to support the small businesses they love and new tools to help those businesses connect with their customers during the coronavirus pandemic.

Support the businesses you love through digital gift-cards

During this challenging time, people are looking for ways to support the businesses that they love in their communities, even when they are not able to give their custom. One way they’re doing that is by purchasing gift cards, so Facebook is rolling out digital gift-cards to help people buy gift cards from local businesses.

From today, businesses will be able to promote their gift cards on Facebook through their own Pages and in News Feed posts, and on Instagram by adding a Gift Card sticker to their Stories or a button to their business profile page. People will also now be able to search for and discover digital gift cards for their favourite local businesses – including restaurants, fitness studios, salons, bookshops, bakeries, and more.

The new digital gift-cards will help small businesses generate income during the lockdown and enable people to continue to support businesses as they look to re-open and start to recover from the crisis.

Support local restaurants and food businesses through food orders

Small businesses and restaurants are facing immense challenges during the COVID-19 crisis. That’s why Instagram is making it easier for businesses to get support from their customers through food orders.

Restaurants and businesses will be able to add an “Action Button” to their profile or post a Food Orders sticker in their Instagram Stories. Customers can tap the button or sticker to make their purchase through Instagram, bringing them the food they love and supporting a local restaurant or business at the same time.

Show your support for small businesses with new stickers

The new “Support Small Business” sticker on Instagram lets people shout out a business they’re loving. Any accounts you follow who use the sticker will be added to a shared Instagram story, allowing you to see other businesses that people are supporting during this time.

Facebook has also added a new feature called ‘Posts from Businesses Near You’ that gives people a single destination to browse the latest posts on Facebook from relevant businesses, including those nearby.

Resources for business owners

In addition, Facebook is working with a range of local partners from the business community to create weekly webinars tailored for Irish SMEs, Boost with Facebook. These training sessions are focused on insights to help businesses, leaders and their employees pivot, transform, re-merge and recover.

Additional tools to help SMBs stay connected to their customers

SMBs will also be able to use a number of new tools to help customers find them and to communicate essential information:

— Businesses can now tag COVID-19 related posts to help keep their customers updated.
— In the coming weeks, Facebook will launch a dedicated business inbox in the Messenger app and an updated chat plugin for business websites. With the plugin, anyone can start chatting with businesses on their favourite websites without needing to login to a Facebook account.

Ciaran Quilty, Vice President of Global Business Group at Facebook said: “Running a company during COVID-19 is far from ‘business as usual’, and for smaller companies, the impact of lockdown has hit hard. SMBs are the backbone of the economy, they sit at the heart of our communities and at Facebook they are part of our story as well, so we want to do all we can to support them at this challenging time. I hope the additional tools and guidance we are launching today will help these businesses weather this difficult period, and with our gift cards and fundraisers I hope more people can say thank you to their favourite small businesses too.”