Following Facebook’s announcement of its Ads Manager App earlier today, Communicate caught up with Jonathan Labin, head of Middle East and Africa at Facebook for a one-on-one.

What is Facebook doing in 2015 to support SMBs?

For over 11 years, Facebook served as a platform for connecting people across the globe and in providing marketers with the opportunity to reach their audiences in a strategic and focused manner. We understand the crucial role SMBs play in the growth of many world economies, and this sector, in particular, has played a major role in the MENA region, where we continue to witness its growth at an unprecedented rate.  Facebook will continue in 2015 to work toward developing various marketing solutions for those businesses, to help them grow further and reach the consumers who matter the most to them.

Our aim is to ensure that every investment spent by SMBs on our platform to reach their customers, sees a major return. Our tool conversion tracking has resulted in better and faster measurement for SMBs presence on the platform.

What are the new ad formats introduced by Facebook that are most popular among advertisers?

We are constantly working on developing the most effect ad formats for our users. We aim to give them the best experience on this platform while they read and share information. One of our most recent popular ad formats has been video, it has gained tremendous popularity and the platform has an average of three billion video views daily on Facebook. Brands and marketers have followed this trend and are now using video to help people discover and learn about their brands.

Are you seeing more of a shift toward mobile advertising this year than before?

There is a significant change in consumer behavior shifting from desktops to mobiles. Realizing this growing trend in people’s use of smartphone and tablets in the region, marketers are clearly opting for Facebook’s mobile solutions to reach out to their customers and share their messages in a concise, but visually creative manner.  To make the creation and management of mobile advertising for marketers of all sizes even easier, we introduced the Ads Manager mobile site last summer, which is now used by more than 800,000 advertisers each month. Almost a year later, today we announced the launch of another application for managing ads, called Ads Manager App. These developments indicate an increasing shift from desktops to mobiles.