Ever since Meta’s new identity emerged from its name change this October, they have been working on revamping the entire image of Meta from Facebook, focusing on its efforts in building the Metaverse.

In Meta’s recent APAC Press Day, Meta shared their core mission, which is to help build the metaverse and let people connect, find communities, and grow businesses.

“2022 is all about helping businesses get future-ready. We know that building the metaverse responsibly means addressing many of the challenges of today.”

Meta will continue to focus on four areas that pave the road towards a better future:

Focus Area 1: Covid-19, Platform Safety and Security

• COVID-19 continues to impact us – Meta’s focus has been on promoting vaccine confidence campaigns and combating misinformation. They rolled out a COVID misinformation media literacy campaign in 32 countries which reached over half a billion people. Meta continues to partner with government and health ministries to launch chatbots on WhatsApp and Messenger which have become a regular source of credible information on COVID and vaccinations.
• Safety and Security: Meta has over 40,000 people working on safety and security and has invested $13 billion to keep people safe on their platforms.
• Meta is committed to being transparent and accountable for their efforts to enforce their policies. In their Community Standards Enforcement Report, 11th edition, they provide metrics on how they enforced their policies from July 2021 through September 2021 (Q3 2021). It includes metrics across 14 policy areas on Facebook and metrics across 12 policies on Instagram.
• The prevalence of hate speech on Facebook has continued to decrease for the fourth quarter in a row. To better address hate speech, bullying and harassment and violence and incitement — all of which require an understanding of language, nuance and cultural norms — Meta deployed a new cross-problem AI system to consolidate learnings for all three to better address each violation area.

Focus Area 2: Supporting Recovery for Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs)

• Meta is at the centre of small businesses. More than 200 million businesses use Meta’s apps every month to create virtual storefronts and reach customers.
• As SMBs have been hit hardest during COVID, Meta has conducted over 450 workshops this year to train 71,000 SMBs in APAC.
• In their latest report on the State of Small Business in September 2021, they published the results of their survey with more than 35,000 small business leaders, across 30 countries and territories. In APAC, they surveyed small businesses in Australia, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam. Meta saw both opportunities and challenges arising from the survey:
  • While the majority of SMBs on Facebook in APAC countries that Meta surveyed reported that they were operational or engaging in revenue-generating activities, their sales dropped significantly.
  • The use of digital tools has increased during the pandemic and is a lifeline for many SMBs. In APAC, nearly 50% of SMBs on Facebook reported at least 25% or more of their sales were made digitally.
  • Women-led businesses in surveyed countries in APAC are doing better than their men-led counterparts in closures and sales performance:
    • For example, in Taiwan, 92% of women-led SMBs vs. 80% of male-led SMBs on Facebook reported that they were operational or engaging in any revenue-generating activities.
      
      
• SMBs expect more challenges ahead than they did at the start of 2021, however, there are signs of optimism among business leaders:
  • 60% of global businesses told Meta that they could carry on for at least 6 months if the current circumstances persist, an increase from 54% in February 2021.
  • 86% of SMBs surveyed globally indicated that they expect to run their business operation at least partially using their digital tools in the future.
    
    
• Key SMB programs by Meta:
  • Boost with Facebook Good Ideas Season:
    • Empower small businesses with free resources, education, and thought leadership to help them prepare for the important shopping season.
    • More than 51M people in APAC tuned into “Boost with Facebook" content in 2020 to hear practical tips for strengthening their business.
  • SheMeansBusiness is Meta’s long-term commitment to women’s economic empowerment:
    • In response to the COVID-19, SheMeansBusiness expanded its scope and added training on business resiliency through financial education.
    • In APAC, Meta has established 26 community partners and expanded their presence to 14 countries.
      
      
• Recommendations for SMBs to win in 2022:
  • Using chat to turn good ideas into year-end sales
    • Enable your customers to message you by including a call-to-action on your Facebook Page or Instagram profile
    • Drive business goals with messaging solutions. Acquire customers, enable transactions, drive awareness and show care to your customers
  • Inspire and engage your customers with video
    • Get creative with attention-grabbing Reels. These multi-clip videos run up to 30 seconds in length and offer easy-to-use text, AR filters and audio to truly engage shoppers.
    • Attract shoppers’ attention and create immersive experiences with Stories. Stories ads allow you to deliver full-screen ads that feature images, videos or carousels and appear between Stories on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger.
  • Get your business ready for Mega Sales day
    • Use Live Shopping to bring the best of the store online by having sales experts offer real-time advice, product demos and retailtainment.
    • With Shops, inspire your customers and help them find the products that are right for them with Facebook and Instagram Shops, which are customized digital storefronts across our apps that make shopping even more seamless.

Focus Areas 3: New Product Experiences

Meta is focused on innovation and shipping new experiences:

REELS

• Instagram Reels recently launched in more countries in the Asia Pacific including Singapore, the Philippines, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and the Pacific Islands. Reels is a new way for anyone to create and discover short, entertaining videos.
  
  

AUDIO

• This year, Meta launched Live Audio Rooms on Facebook, where people can listen to and join in live conversations with public figures, creators and groups.
  
  

PORTAL+ and PORTAL GO

• Two new additions to the portal family.
  
  

RAY-BAN STORIES

• Smart glasses giving people a new way to capture photos and videos from a first-person perspective.
  
  

HORIZON WORKROOMS

• Virtual workspace to boost collaboration.
  
  

SHOPS

• In APAC, Meta has expanded Shops to 18 markets with Japan and Korea showing encouraging signs of embracing the product.

With more SMBs reliant on digital tools, Meta is continuing to invest in new products and tools to help businesses connect with their customers and simplify day-to-day management. Meta has announced new free and paid business tools and updates to existing products for small businesses to get discovered and connect with customers: 

MESSAGING

• Messenger Business Audio and Video Calling: Messenger is testing audio and video calling features for small businesses globally.
  
  

ADS + BUSINESS TOOLS

• Live Audio Rooms for SMBs: Enabling Live Audio Rooms for select Small Businesses using NPE.
• Expanded Appointment Bookings to SMBs Globally: An easy and free way to receive and manage appointments from new and existing customers using their Facebook page. It also enables customers to book appointments with local service providers at convenient times.
• Simplifying Ad Creation from your Facebook Page: Meta is making it easier for small businesses by consolidating 11 goals into three: Automated Ads, Create an Ad, Boost Existing Content.
• Create Instagram Ads in Facebook Business Suite: Easily create Instagram-only ads in Facebook Business Suite Web.
• Facebook Business Suite ads guidance and education: New ads management experience that calculates collection-level ad insights.

Focus Area 4: Being a Force for Good

• As a company, Meta wants to continue to empower people to drive impact in their communities. Over 20M people in Asia are part of over 45,000 charity and volunteer groups on Facebook.
• Just in the last 3 months, people across the Asia Pacific have shown their support for small businesses by creating more than 3 million stories using the sticker. 
• To connect more people with factual resources from leading climate organizations, Meta expanded their Climate Science Center to more than 100 countries, including 39 countries in Asia.
• Meta expanded their blood donations tool to 9 more countries in Asia - more than 90 million people across Asia have signed up to receive notifications about donating blood since its launch. 
• This year, the Facebook Community Accelerator program received more than 13,000 applications, with 19 of the final 131 participants coming from Asia-Pacific - each group admin will receive US$50,000 to help fund work that advances the communities goals.
• When the world came together for Tokyo 2020, Asia cheer the loudest - Indonesia’s Greysia Polli, Hidilyn Diaz from the Philippines and Tai Tzu Ying from Taiwan, were some of the topmost talked about athletes globally across Facebook and Instagram.

Asia Pacific Trends

To highlight new business models and shine a light on the people and ideas that are driving change in APAC, Meta launched a video series called Ideas That Matter. The second episode dives into the social trends shaping business in 2022 will be available on Meta for Business Page.

While many of these trends will take years to reach their full potential, it is clear that at least five of these trends will only grow in popularity in the near term: 

• Virtual and Augmented Reality: While many aspects of the metaverse will take shape over many years, they are seeing applications for AR/VR becoming mainstream, everything from trying clothes and shoes virtually before you purchase them to working remotely in a virtual space. They are seeing a lot of people engaging with AR technology today. Spark AR is Meta’s AR platform for the creation and distribution of AR filters and effects across their apps and device. Creators in the Asia Pacific and Latin America account for over 60% of Spark AR’s monthly active users. Meta is investing in programs to support Spark creators to grow their skills, pursue new opportunities, and establish themselves professionally. This includes a $150 investment over the next three years in Immersive Learning, a new initiative to kickstart the AR/VR ecosystem for education, career development and access to the metaverse.
• Business Messaging: Messaging as a tool is more popular than ever. Meta now has 500 million people messaging a business each day on their platforms. This also has implications for social commerce - as people discover products they love through their friend’s feeds. Being a message-able business can mean the difference between growth and stagnation.
• Mega Sale Days: Increasingly, these events are fusing entertainment and shopping – and are continuing to grow. Publicis Groupe identified three key takeaways for this trend. One is that Mega Sale Days are becoming the point of entry for a lot of first-time online shoppers. Two, it’s not just about discounts anymore, people are choosing brands for the equity and what they stand for in people’s minds and lastly, the entire consumer journey is becoming a lot more social and experiential in nature.
• Creators: As the pandemic raged, people had to stay home and find ways to entertain themselves over long periods of time. Naturally, home-based content surged across a range of topics and formats: cooking tutorials, family entertainment fitness hacks and yes, even business and finance creators. According to AnyMind research, the numbers of macro-influencers (100,000 to 1 million followers) across the region grew by 66 per cent over 2021 – particularly in Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan and Thailand. According to CB Insights, the global creator economy has seen a record $1.3 billion in funding in 2021 alone, nearly three times what it received in 2020. Creators are a new and more diverse form of media. They are becoming brands and are driving engagement levels that make them powerful retail channels too. The first episode of Ideas That Matter: Creator Economy in Asia is available on Meta for Business Page.
• Video: Digital video viewers in APAC will exceed 2 billion by 2022, a year earlier than previously projected, according to eMarketer. Businesses now have lots of ways to reach people with video from ads in Messenger to instant experiences and Reels. Externally, 2 billion people in APAC are already watching videos online. In fact, people in Indonesia, Japan, Singapore and India are spending more hours watching videos online than linear TV.

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