Being a small business owner has always been hard. It’s been even harder for the past two years when streets emptied, and people became more dependent on online purchases.

In the Middle East, family businesses are a staple of every street and neighbourhood, run by and for the residents of those areas. Simply put, they are the heartbeat of our communities.

But with the pandemic causing a global recession, small businesses, often ill-equipped to face a rapidly evolving e-commerce landscape, were going out of business. Simply by shopping online, people were inadvertently shifting their spending to giant corporations, turning SMB to an endangered species.

Meta saw a window to help. The brand wants to be a key partner for SMBs and was keen on encouraging people and their communities to support their local shops.

How could the global giant Meta support local shops from MENA regions?

SMBs have personal relationships with their customers.

They know their names, what they want and exactly how they want it. Customers become part of the family and feel like they have a personal stake in that business, pushing everyone they know to experience the places they love.

When competitors hold all the cards and have all the money and advertising space, what is there left for SMBs?

They have something much more powerful: people’s love.

We had to find a way to make this love louder, more vocal and thus more useful for the businesses that communities wanted to support.

We created “Space for Rent”, a movement empowering people to become a living ad space for their favorite SMBs by using their most powerful asset: their social profiles.

All they had to do: turn their cover photos and social profiles into an advertising space for their favorite local business.

Economic turmoil is unequal – especially when it comes to eCommerce. Giants like Amazon, Carrefour, Ebay and others can spend on online advertising as they please, saturating our search results and our feeds.

SMBs are nowhere as lucky. For them, getting more customers is an uphill battle. A google search is enough proof: big companies come first, leaving smaller businesses to the later pages no one ever bothers clicking on.

We knew people loved the stores in their community, but our challenge was much bigger: SMBs were not just competing among each other, they faced a David vs. Goliath situation, facing major companies on an uneven playing field.

These businesses heavily rely on footfall to generate sales. And outside of their regulars, their main source of new business was passers-by seeing the store sign… during a pandemic, this was a lost cause.

We had to rally everyone to our cause.

The movement was kicked off with an online film celebrating real relationships between people and the local SMBs in their communities showing how in these relationships, it’s more than business, it’s personal. Real real stories and real people were used instead of actors to further drive the campaign’s authenticity. The film encouraged everyone on Facebook and Instagram to join the movement and toolkits made it easier for people to participate.

Famous actors, chefs, and influencers rallied to our cause (without any compensation): Mohamed Henedy, Faisal al Saif, Kris Fade and many others across the region joined the movement, donating their profiles to share posts and stories about their beloved SMBs and asking their followers to share their favourites as well.

Faced with all this love and support, the SMB themselves showed their thanks and appreciation with videos, notes and packages to those that stood by them.

What started small turned into a movement.

It became the talk of the region, with 100+ articles covering it worth $1,217,125 in earned PR value. Over 60% of all the articles used the campaign hashtag in the headline helping spread our movement!

On Facebook and Instagram, the campaign received over 245,000 total interactions (and that’s just from verified accounts, public accounts and manually tracked pages).

The videos and reels shared by our partner content creators highlighting some of their favourite local businesses have been viewed at least 2.3 million times.

All this taking place in French, English and Arabic across the entire region!

For Meta, the outcome was strong too, with their role as a key partner to SMBs being mentioned in 100% of the articles. And with zero negative coverage as well!

Here’s to using social media for good by amplifying our love and support!