Facebook woos businesses with 'education centre'

Facebook has created an 'online education centre' to help businesses set up pages on the popular social networking site.

The Facebook for Business information hub, opened up on Tuesday, contains a marketing pitch and guide, aimed at businesses that have not yet established a corporate presence on Facebook involving company pages, ads and 'sponsored stories'. It also lists various links to help those businesses do so.

The market-leading social networking firm's move came shortly after Google backtracked on plans, announced earlier in July, to trial business pages on its new Google+ social network with a limited set of companies.

Google said at the time that it had realised it could not trial such a service with just a few thousand organisations, and said it would enable business profiles for everyone "in the next few months".

Google+, seen by many as the first real potential rival to Facebook since that company overtook MySpace, is itself still in limited beta, and was only announced one month ago.

Facebook, on the other hand, has been seriously courting business customers since November 2007, when it launched Facebook Ads.

The service was described at the time as "a way for businesses to build pages on Facebook to connect with their audiences; an ad system that facilitates the spread of brand messages virally through Facebook Social Ads; and an interface to gather insights into people's activity on Facebook that marketers care about".