Demonstrating the
crucial importance of social media and advertising in an increasingly virtualised
global community, payment processing and credit card company Visa Inc. has announced
the launching of its Visa Business Network.
Visa Business
Network launches as a Facebook application and is aimed at small businesses. Visa will be looking to grow early interest
amongst their target market largely through incentive marketing, offering a total
of $2 million USD in Facebook advertising credit to the first 20,000 businesses
who sign up to the community. The offer
is only available to businesses located in the United States.
Visa?s chief
marketing officer, Antonio Lucio says Visa wants to help small businesses in
the three key areas of growth, connection and management. He comments, "Visa has been working
closely with small businesses for many years, and we know that they are
anything but small (...). Small businesses
have big ideas, big expectations and big ambitions. Working with Facebook, Visa
is breaking new ground by harnessing social networking to connect business
owners."
The Visa Business
Network essentially is essentially a mini-social networking community sat
within the Facebook platform. Business
owners joining the Visa group will be able to connect with other business
owners to share ideas and reach potential customers on Facebook. Each member can build up a fan-base of satisfied
customers, on whose page the business will be visible as recommended to all
their friends.
Dan Rose, vice president of business
development at Facebook says, ?With more than 80 million active users
worldwide, Facebook gives small businesses a great opportunity to connect with
their customers and other business owners. We are proud to work with Visa on
the Visa Business Network to bring even more tools to small businesses."
The new
business-to-business (B2B) community gives small business owners the
opportunity to source and interact directly with professionals working in
similar fields, as well as with recognized experts from publications such as The
Wall Street Journal and Entrepreneur. Topical advice on classic management
issues is also available through a selection of articles and videos.