SMEs find Facebook important marketing tool

By PETER ESILA
Many small to medium-sized enterprises are using Facebook to market their products, says the executive director of Business Council of PNG, Douveri Henao.
He said from a cost point of view, it was good for them as there were almost 750,000 users of Facebook in the country.
“Facebook is becoming a significant player in almost every form of the commercial, social and economic space,” he said.
“Although the penetration level is still restricted to Port Moresby-based users, the trend is upward. The likelihood of Facebook increasing is highly likely.
“From an e-commerce space, this is one of the active forums that it is coming out in the market.
“Many SMEs are using this capability, but we are now seeing that they are becoming more ambitious with the use of artificial intelligence, both in Google platform and in Facebook platform, to draw their user base.
“Some companies are already moving into that algorithm digital marketing product space.
“They already beginning to interpret what the PNG consumer is wanting, what is the consumer interest, demographics, gender.
“These are the sorts of things that are already available for PNG businesses and this is the demonstration of big data and artificial intelligence.”
“The only contingency factor is that it is targeting only a fraction of the population, so hypostatically, when internet becomes cheap, consumers increase on the digital space, big data will become a major factor in the buying and selling of products in this country.”