How to effectively grow your online business on Facebook and Instagram

Last updated on: June 8, 2022

Facebook and Instagram are two of the world’s biggest social platforms. With more than 2 billion registered users, it is important to understand how these platforms (if used correctly) can positively benefit your brand. 

Red Points hosted the 2021 Brand Intelligence Summit, joined by Facebook and Instagram, Inter Milan, Pura Vida and Draft Top to discuss protecting and growing brands in social media in unprecedented times. During the Summit, Facebook and Instagram shared tips on how to grow online business and effectively protect brands’ IP on the platforms in 2021.

Key takeaways: 

• Best practices from Facebook and Instagram to help businesses grow in 2021
• Strategies for protecting IP on Facebook and Instagram
• Overview of tools provided by Facebook and Instagram to help brands protect their IP 

The following is the transcript of Red Points’ session with Facebook and Instagram’s associate general counsel Sabrina Perelman, Facebook and Instagram Global Manager, Rightsholder Operations Michelle Moon and Red Points VP of Brand Relationships Daniel Shapiro.

Daniel:          

Hello everyone, and welcome. First let me introduce Sabrina, she is the associate general counsel of IP from Facebook and Instagram. Her team manages the policy and guidelines for addressing user content on Facebook and Instagram that may infringe on third party IP rights. Sabrina has been with Facebook and managing the team for over 6 years. Welcome Sabrina! 

Sabrina:        

Hi everybody.

Daniel:          

And then let me introduce our next guest Michelle Moon, who is the Global Rightsholder Operations. Her team focuses on operations and support of IP/brand protection efforts, including engagement with rights holders and brands alongside Sabrina’s team to closely collaborate on these issues. Michelle has been leading this team now for over 4 years. Welcome Michelle!

Michelle:      

Thank you! Great to be here.

Daniel:          

Thanks Michelle for joining us. I will be hosting the session and I’m ready to learn alongside everybody that is attending the session. Sabrina, I will start the first question with you: 

Q: Given the current global environment, particularly with the COVID19 pandemic, how has Facebook and Instagram helped businesses to survive during this tumultuous year?

Sabrina:        

Obviously COVID-19 has changed the entire world around us, including the way we all interact with each other. We’ve seen an unprecedented shift online on basically every walk in our life, from work to connection with friends and family, and the way that businesses are trying to reach customers and customers trying to reach products that they care about. 

So we are a social media company but we are identifying the needs of our community in that way and businesses and customers are equally part of our community. One of the ways that we have contributed to this shift online is by making it easier for people to shop and helping businesses to adapt to the new environment, or in, by making buying and selling more accessible and more secure within Facebook. 

It means that we are making it easier to discover and shop for things that you love across our apps, including through things like Facebook shop and Instagram shopping. We are building tools to help businesses of all sizes to tell their brand story and grow their audience and their businesses online. For example, Instagram shops let businesses create a digital storefront so that any seller no matter their size, large or small, no matter their budget, can bring their business online even when it wasn’t before, and connect with customers whenever and wherever it is convenient for them. 

There is lots more information in our facebook for business portal as well as the news section where we’ve made a bunch of announcements throughout 2020 about the evolution of the shops.

Daniel:          

Thank you Sabrina, I think what’s critical to the health and wellness of so many businesses is the ability to utilize the features and tools that facebook and instagram provided for businesses to make it until one day we can all do businesses in person. A question for Michelle would be: 

Q: As more businesses are shifting online, how can brands protect their IP on Facebook and Instagram specifically?

Michelle:      

That’s a great question. And as Sabrina mentioned, these are really challenging times, and we, at Facebook, are deeply committed to and care about keeping the platform safe, as well as for many businesses out there and listening today, how to keep your IP safe.

So, there are a number of ways and investments that our company and our IP teams have made to provide avenues for reporting, what may be infringing or violating your IP or the business’s IP and/or our own terms of use or terms of service on the platform. While we do have a number of ways to report, by and large the most frequent and preferred way to do that is through our standard publicly available reporting forms.

Before I get into that, I just wanted to mention very quickly, in terms of the investments, our global IP operations team has grown tremendously over the years, just as the platform has. It really has been in luxe up with our program in order to keep this a truly robust notice and takedown program.

What that means is every single report that comes in, there’s actually a person on our IP operations team reviewing it and processing that report. Our team now numbers upwards of, I believe it’s 300, and that doesn’t even include all of the additional teams that we work together with in order to do all of the enforcement and various policies across the platform. That includes product, engineering, policy teams, legal teams, and so forth. So, there’s quite a great investment across the company to do this work. And our team also is 24/7 global. I won’t elaborate too much but we have offices around the world and in multiple local languages.

Daniel:

Thank you. And maybe as a follow-up question, Michelle, you mentioned in your answer to that question about some reporting forms.

Q: Where can brands or businesses find these reporting forms and use some of those features?

Michelle:

Yes. As I mentioned, the forms are publicly available. 

To take a step back, these forms are available within our help centers. We have a Facebook help center and an Instagram help center, and within both of those you can find our dedicated forms for IP. There are forms specifically for copyright, trademark, and counterfeit specifically.

For more insights and tips to battle infringement issues on facebook and instagram, as well as information on processes for content removal, and tools businesses can leverage, head up to the Brand Intelligence Summit 2021 and find out more.