Not too long ago I was a business owner in Indonesia. Reflecting back while living in Silicon Valley, I realize that top social media platforms missed out on onboarding business owners.
Onboarding users has not been a problem for Facebook and Instagram, as you see below. But for the small business owners who make up most of the 70% of able-bodied adults that are engaged in the informal employment in my home country, using Instagram for business means purely posting product pictures on their account and providing contact info to then engage customers to transact.
The reason why I am focusing on Instagram is, honestly, because I am personally much more addicted to it than Facebook. Also, Instagram has maintained an admirable level of class in its product and UX design. It has a huge potential as a marketing platform without being too creepy, and it is better positioned to capture users with visually-appealing messaging quickly.
I finally spent money on Instagram with confidence, after years of just posting organically and suddenly finding out that it can deliver amazing results for engagement and conversion in the US. I was managing a small tech startup and I needed to drive traffic to a higher education portal.
I put together a GIF that was colorful, driving high-school aged users to take a quiz to figure out their choice of major in college. Clicks on this simple GIF below increased our traffic by at least 30% in the first week. Plain and simple, Instagram works! But it just dawned on me that I wouldn’t even think of setting up an account and having faith in spending a few dollars on the first campaign, if I wasn’t able to read English and hadn’t had the curiosity to do research online myself.
I think Instagram is missing out on capitalizing on small business owners who need to compete in a very chaotic economy that is more digital than ever before, where stay-at-home moms try to sell homemade chili paste and millennial entrepreneurs sell apparel on the platform. They invest a lot of time on social media to interact and chat with their customers because they know it is the most efficient way to run a small business. Combining Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp, LINE and SMS, they run a business on their phone. But this is hardly detectable, because to the eyes of technologists, their activities on these platforms seem sporadic and un-monetizable. I read an article on Bloomberg Businessweek that Instagram noticed how some users in Indonesia take posts down repeatedly, and then figured out that those are business owners who post products on their feed and then take them down as things get sold.
Now as an Indonesian myself, I can say that Indonesians in general are skeptical about anything with a full price tag. So for social media that’s free and fun, the adoption rate is crazy, as seen in the last decade. But based on my observation as I was running my own business, paid advertising by small business owners was non-existent.
The business model of my startup was to help universities advertise digitally and it failed. The marketing teams on the client side were always excited about what we do, but the people who are in charge of the funds almost never signed off on the fees we charged. But most of it was my fault, because the first 3–4 years of running it I couldn’t figure out and demonstrate how to market the service of helping these universities drive applications via social media. I remember vividly that creating our Facebook page only happened in the second year, and that I set up Instagram Business account only in the last year.
I would have loved to work with Instagram’s reps on the field and learn how to use Facebook Ads Manager to spend a bit of my savings every month to extend our reach, instead of only visiting schools to engage prospective users. From this lesson, I thought to myself, what if Instagram had offices in metro areas in the country to help business owners set up their accounts and get training on posting ads. I am imagining Instagram paying for billboards that say “Run Your Business on Instagram” and sending entrepreneurship enthusiasts to these local offices — to attend business seminars or even get their products photographed professionally for free. Although e-commerce is growing like an epidemic there, B2B digital services to help e-commerce succeed are not a real thing because people think they can run their business by just making connections through their family and friends. I see this as an opportunity for Instagram to have more of a localized presence — creating programs for high-touch engagement with thousands small business owners and instilling a habit of using Instagram strategically and religiously to grow their businesses. The last part makes me think — Instagram doesn’t really have to commit to having a permanent office forever in emerging markets, because once a few business owners figure things out, the ideas will spread and Instagram will not just become a fabric of everybody’s digital life but also business operations.
This particular idea excites me because Instagram can really position itself as a proponent of entrepreneurship in fast-growing economies like Indonesia that love and admire small businesses. Instead of being seen as purely a source of cyber addiction, Instagram can collaborate with the government to empower businesses and have a real impact. Also, in Indonesia kids and college grads grow up being told that being a business owner is the fastest way to prosperity. Many full-time white-collar and blue-collar workers find themselves doing a business on the side because their salary is just not enough.
Having a website like “Instagram Business” is not enough because Indonesians simply don’t read much, esp. to learn. A model that is promising got started in India where there are over 200 million users of Facebook (double Indonesia’s figure). There is the SME India Council that caters to business owners, but their work is so far still limited to “share feedback, discuss new ideas and work with Facebook to build better ads solutions” with directors of big corporations and digital startup founders. But what about entrepreneurs that want to grow their dabbawalas network with their social media account and smart phone? Again, there are still no real people to meet to train them how to use social media for their businesses meaningfully.
Things to improve for current business users … I think there is room for improvement on communicating analytics. Indonesians don’t use their email so an app is the solution, but even that, Facebook Ads Manager on the App Store only gets 2.5 stars. The current metrics are still focused on how much is spent but not success metrics for the customers. I think one can expand beyond just total counts of ‘reach’ and ‘post engagement’. And how about using analytics to provide consulting for the business users — for example, which customer segments should be targeted based on industry?
Until recently Facebook’s revenue in Asia Pacific is not proportional to their user base, so I guess that says something.
