When Facebook Came to Miami: Inside the "Boost Your Business" Event at Soho Studios

Before “social-first” was a phrase anyone used, Facebook took its small-business movement on the road — and one of those stops was Soho Studios in Miami. The team transformed a warehouse into a blue-lit world of white hedges, café counters, and yellow Schwinn cruisers, all beneath that unmistakable f. We were there as part of it.

From Center Stage, Dan Levy — then Facebook’s Director of small business, who would spend fourteen years in leadership across Facebook and Meta and today serves as CEO of Legends — set the tone for the day with a line that has stayed with us ever since:

“This isn’t social marketing. Or digital marketing. This is marketing. This is where many of your current and potential customers come every day.”Dan Levy · Director, small business at Facebook

“Facebook is about people. And people connect not only to their friends and family members; they also connect to the businesses they love. Facebook wants to help small businesses reach all of the people that matter to them, so that they can grow and thrive.”Facebook

The screens told the scale of the moment — 30 million small businesses with active Pages — and the room was full of the owners behind them, including USA TODAY columnist and bestselling author Rhonda Abrams (The Successful Business Plan) and digital-lifestyle expert Mario Armstrong. On the event’s whiteboard wall, businesses wrote their names and handles — and ours, Agency 333 (today, we are Luxury Brand Marketing), was among them, one of the companies Facebook recognized and invited in.

For us, it confirmed a conviction we’d already built a business on: the brands that win are the ones who show up where their customers actually are, with craft and consistency. It’s the same belief — now applied at the highest end of the market — that drives Luxury Brand Marketing today.

Suereea Mathews · Agency 333 — at Soho Studios, Miami. #Facebook #SmallBusiness #BoostYourBusiness #LuxuryBrandMarketing