Visa invests in Facebook

One of the world's largest credit card companies, Visa, will pay social networking megasite Facebook £1 million for the promotion of its small business service to their users. The first 20,000 businesses in the US to download Visa's services via Facebook will receive $100 in advertising credit.

Visa is trying to take advantage of Facebook's 80 million global audience and help small firms run more efficiently with the online branch of their service. There are approximately 80,000 small online businesses with Facebook profiles, surely to be followed by many more, and there are hundreds of programmes that have been created especially for the entertainment of the social networking website users, however most of these programmes (photosharing, film interest comparisons, etc.) are free, with no profit to be made for anyone.

Nonetheless, Visa and Facebook are hoping that at least some of these companies will be able to use the social networking website for online marketing and will turn a profit from it at some point in the future.