Meta has $22.6B economic impact, supports 170K jobs in Florida

Ahead of National Small Business Week, Meta released new data highlighting the company’s economic impact in Florida.

Data shows that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, generates more than $415 billion in economic activity per year and supports more than 3.1 million jobs in the United States. In Florida alone, the company has a $22.6 billion economic impact and is linked to about 170,000 jobs.

Meta said 96% of Florida businesses that use Facebook are small or medium-sized, about two in five (41%) are women-led businesses, and the same number are minority-led. More than half of those businesses (56%) are using digital tools to connect with customers, and 36% make at least a quarter of their sales digitally in any given month.

Further, 28% of Florida’s small businesses say using digital tools, such as those provided by Meta, have helped them increase sales.

Meta calculated economic activity in the U.S. and in each individual state based on the economic flows associated with their advertising and non-advertising services.

U.S. businesses spent a total of $49 billion on ads on Facebook and Instagram last year. According to experimental evidence detailed in a scholarly article authored by University of California-Berkeley professor Steven Tadelis and other economists, businesses earn $3.31 in revenue for every $1 they spend advertising on Meta platforms.

Meta then used standard input-output methodology and multipliers from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis to estimate how much total economic activity and employment is generated each year by the supply chains that support those sales.

The company said the measure may be conservative since it does not account for the value of the free services it provides, such as business pages.