For small businesses, advertising has always been a heavy burden. A quick look at the ad budget of some large scale enterprises and you’ll understand that the barrier to entry for traditional media advertising is way too high. SMEs can not compete on the same turf with these guys. Which is why social media was such a huge gamechanger and caused a significant shift in the advertising landscape.

Suddenly, SMEs could reach more people, acquire more customers and outperform even the big businesses in the marketplace. All you needed was the right skill and knowledge (and possibly early adopter’s advantage).

Right now, for small businesses looking to grow their user/customer base, Facebook advertising looks like the platform giving the best value for money. Here’s why:

16 million Nigerians (and counting)

According to Facebook’s latest report, Nigeria has 16 million people logging into the platform, at least once a month(the highest of all African countries). About 7 million of them log in everyday, making Nigeria Facebook’s biggest market.

(No) Character Limit

Twitter has its appeal, obviously but the character limit presents a handicap that is not so conducive for ads. Even Twitter agrees, which is why they may be increasing the character limit anytime soon. Facebook has a 63,000 character limit (that’s about a tenth of a novel). More than enough for you to persuade your audience to try out your product or service.

Facebook collects and uses personal data to target ads

As a user, this irks me. But as an advertiser, this is a dream come true. Google’s been doing this for years, so why not Facebook? Targeted ads means you can be sure people with the right interests got to see your ads. For years, Facebook has tweaked their code to accumulate more user data. And now, a lot of that data is available to advertisers.

Barrier to entry

This is a bit of a personal observation but it seems like, everyone (plus their uncle) is on Facebook. Twitter seems to be crawling all over with millennials, Instagram still hasn’t caught on as much and a lot of folks are still trying to figure out what SnapChat is. Facebook is still the only social network with broad appeal, for now.

Support from HQ

Top Facebook executives recently met with advertising agencies and SME owners in Nigeria to discuss ways to use the Facebook platform to grow their business. A few entrepreneurs shared success stories, about how they’ve used Facebook advertising to drive their business.

For example, Dejuwon Isola-Osobu, founder and CEO of Jayosbie, an online fashion store for men, highlighted how cheap Facebook advertising is, especially when compared with other social media platforms. He explained that a recent campaign by his brand delivered 14,000 clicks for just $260.

Nunu Ntshingila, Head of Africa for Facebook, also went on record to say, Facebook is “the best platform for African SMEs to promote their brands.”

I’d have to agree with her.