DATASETS
Small Business Surveys
More than 200 million businesses use Facebook. From 2017-2022, we surveyed these businesses quarterly to learn about their unique perspectives, challenges and opportunities across nearly 100 countries.
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Key Features
Timeliness
Traditional surveys about small businesses typically take place about once a decade. For a period of five years, Facebook surveyed millions of small businesses more frequently and shared timely insights with decision-makers.COVID-19 insights
These surveys featured waves with questions focused on business challenges related to COVID-19 and allowed for frequent monitoring of changes in business climate as a result of the pandemic.Gender insights
Meta’s small business surveys offer unique insights on women-owned small businesses, such as their access to capital and the unique challenges they faced during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Methodology
Step 1: Design Questionnaire
We designed novel questionnaires each wave in collaboration with various partners including academic institutions, the World Bank and OECD. Waves also periodically included special modules such as those focused on water or climate change.Step 2: Recruit survey participants
On a quarterly basis, the surveys were sent to administrators of businesses on Facebook, such as admins and owners of Facebook-designated small business pages.Step 3: Protect privacy
We remove unique identifiers and group some responses. We only share data publicly once we aggregate/group to the country or region level.Step 4: Weight results
To achieve better representation of the small business population, we weighted survey results based on known characteristics of the Facebook Page admin population.RESOURCES
Using Small Business Surveys
Privacy protected information from Meta’s Small Business Surveys is publicly available on the Humanitarian Data Exchange. Researchers and nonprofits interested in microdata can fill out the form below to gain access.
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