• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, June 8, 2015

Continuing to court small- and medium-sized businesses, Facebook is inviting them to use its Place Tips service, which pops place-based information right into users’ News Feed.

Since Facebook began testing Place Tips earlier this year, local businesses have seen an increase in Page traffic from in-store visitors, a Facebook spokeswoman said on Monday.

Now, any U.S.-based SMB can sign up to request a Facebook Bluetooth to guarantee that their customers will see Place Tips in their mobile feeds.

If and when users choose to view a particular Place Tip, they get access to posts and photos that friends have shared about that place, along with general information, including a place’s official Page, popular items sold at said place and upcoming events.

With obvious appeal for advertisers looking to track user location, a more mature local listings business could certainly boost Facebook’s bottom line.

Indeed, location-based social networking is big business. By 2016, 90% of smartphones will be enabled with GPS technology, and as a result, the global, real-time, mobile location-based advertising and marketing market is expected to reach $9 billion by 2017.

Facebook’s small- and medium-sized business strategy already appears to have achieved critical mass. The social giant recently surpassed 2 million active advertisers -- most of which are SMBs.

The milestone followed aggressive efforts by Facebook to get SMBs spending more on its platform.

Last summer, the company launched a five-city tour led by Dan Levy, Facebook’s director of small business, to sell small businesses on the power of paid social. As part of that effort, Levy emphasized Facebook’s ability to reach consumers on mobile devices, where Facebook users spend most of their time.

More recently, Facebook developed a “Local Awareness” ad unit that can target potential patrons within a certain radius of a business’ address.

Late last year, Facebook quietly relaunched its Places Directory, which is essentially a local search engine. Users can use the directory find a “place” by location or another place name.

Facebook also recently debuted an app for advertisers to manage their ad campaigns on the go. With the app, partners can track ad performance, edit existing ads, edit ad budgets and schedules, receive push notifications, and even create new ads.

The app was designed to complement an Ads Manager mobile site, which Facebook launched last summer, and which is presently being used by some 800,000 advertisers each month.

Going forward, there is still plenty of room for growth among SMBs. Last year, COO Sheryl Sandberg said Facebook had more than 30 million active small business pages -- all of whom are potential ad partners.

Industrywide, more SMBs are using social media to augment their ad efforts, and their search campaigns in particular. SMBs that spend more than $25,000 annually on advertising and promotion plan to allocate 17.4% of their marketing budgets to social media in the next 12 months, according to recent findings from BIA/Kelsey's Local Commerce Monitor service.