Future Of Business Survey - Aggregated Data

More than 200 million businesses use Facebook. Meta partners with various academic and international organizations to survey these businesses throughout the year to learn about their perspectives, challenges and opportunities. With more businesses leveraging online tools each day, these surveys provide a lens into a new mobilized and digital economy.

The Future of Business Survey (FoBS) is a collaboration between Meta, the OECD and the World Bank to provide timely insights on the perceptions, challenges, and outlook of online Small and Medium Enterprises or Businesses (SMEs/SMBs). The target population consists of SMEs that have an active Facebook business Page and include both newer and longer-standing businesses, spanning across a variety of sectors. The Future of Business Survey was first launched as a monthly survey in 17 countries in February 2016 and expanded to 42 countries in 2018. In 2019, the Future of Business survey increased coverage to 97 countries and moved to a bi-annual cadence. In 2020, the Future of Business Survey shifted to do additional monthly waves with questions focused on business challenges related to COVID-19.

Meta also shares information from other SMB surveys, such as those that feed into the Global State of Small Business Reports, which are fielded to active Facebook Page Administrators and the general population of Facebook users. These surveys are conducted in approximately 30 countries across the globe and are also conducted on a roughly bi-annual basis.

Survey questions for all surveys cover a range of topics depending on the survey wave such as business characteristics, challenges, financials and strategy in addition to custom modules related to regulation, gender inequity, access to finance, digital technologies, reduction in revenues, business closures, reduction of employees and challenges/needs of the business.

Aggregated country level data is available to the public here for each wave and controlled access microdata is available to Data for Good partners.

To request access to survey microdata or to see published Meta reports, please visit: futureofbusinesssurvey.org

Update 12/12/21: We have transitioned all small business survey datasets to have survey weights applied. Files with weighted estimates have now replaced the previously posted unweighted estimates.

Update 10/4/21: Aggregate data in files [gsosb_2021julyaugust_data_aggregate_weighted.csv] and [gsosb_2021february_data_aggregate_weighted.csv] have been updated to provide weighted results and to correct an error found in those two files. These files were discovered to present results for large businesses rather than small and medium businesses and have been updated to provide the information for the latter group. Downloads of these two files that took place between April 1 and September 30 2021 were affected and analysis using downloads from this period may need to be amended. No analyses or reports published by Facebook were affected.

Please contact dataforgood@fb.com for any questions.