Facebook is reorganizing its products team, bringing ads and free products for businesses under one umbrella

Reuters

• Facebook has unified its Ads and Business Platform team that builds products for businesses under one mandate and leadership.
• The team used to be two separate groups, one focusing on paid products and ads and the other on free products and tools.
• The unified group will be led by longtime Facebook exec Dan Levy, who said the goal is to better serve businesses across the board.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Facebook is announcing today that it's overhauled its Ads and Business Platform (ABP) team that builds products for businesses under one mandate and leadership.

The team used to be divided into two groups, one focused on developing paid products and ads and the other focused on free products and tools. The groups are now being combined under longtime Facebook exec Dan Levy, who said the goal is to better serve businesses across the board and build more holistic paid and free products.

Levy was previously Facebook's VP of small business and a counterpart of Carolyn Everson, Facebook's VP of global marketing solutions. He recently moved out of the sales organization, as Business Insider first reported, becoming the VP of product on ads. That role has now expanded to include all of business product.

Meanwhile, Mark Rabkin and Rob Goldman, who were VP of Ads and Business Platform and VP of Ads respectively, will move on to other roles in the company, Facebook said. Rabkin's next role will involve leading VR and AR experiences for Facebook, said a source familiar with the company.

Read More: Facebook quietly reshuffles its top sales execs

Facebook recently rolled out a number of tools for small businesses, including automated ads and appointments. While the former was built by the ads team, the latter was built by the business platform or free tools team. In the future, the teams will be more aligned to build products together.

"The strategic rationale for this comes from frankly just listening to our clients," Levy told Business Insider. "I've had the chance to go all over the world to talk to our smallest businesses and our biggest businesses, and they don't draw a distinction between what they do on Facebook that is organic or free, and what they do that is paid."

The move comes as small and medium businesses become an increasing priority for Facebook. The social network has 90 million small businesses on its platform, said Levy, but only 7 million of those businesses are active advertisers. The hope of combining these product teams is to cater to those businesses.

"It's in our best interest to continue to nurture them, whether they're using the paid or organic products," said Levy.

Facebook also has been more closely integrating products across its flagship app and Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp.

"When you're a business, you don't go to Instagram to buy ads or to Messenger to buy ads - you need a central service to buy your ads to reach people across all of those family of apps," said Levy. "We think messaging and chat and some of the things that our businesses are doing on WhatsApp and Messenger is going to be the future in the next five to 10 years."