Facebook Canada has launched a new program called Grand for Good that aims to pair small business owners in the Greater Toronto Area with teams from 10 Canadian media agencies to help improve their online marketing plans on the social media site.

“The idea for the program came from the constant requests from senior leaders at agencies in terms of how [to] create more scaleable, ongoing education programs for their digital and non-digital teams,” Alfredo Tan, group director, global marketing solutions at Facebook Canada, tells MiC. “We are constantly speaking at conferences and people ask how they can use our tools better.”

Small businesses who are interested in the program, which is a first for Facebook worldwide, have until Friday Aug. 23 to submit their entries. Selected businesses will be notified by Friday Sept. 6, after which they will be paired with a team from one of the 10 participating media agencies – M2Universal, MEC, MediaCom Canada, Mindshare, OMD Canada, PHD Network Canada, Starcom Mediavest Group, UM Canada, Vision7 International (Cossette and Jungle Media) and ZenithOptimedia Canada.

Media agencies in the program will work with the selected small businesses for a period of four to six weeks to build a strategy and use $5,000 in Facebook advertising credits to build a marketing plan on the site. Teams in the program will compete to see who can build the most effective Facebook presence, according to a release on the program.

Tan says the program is launching in the GTA and, based on performance, it will potentially expand to other major Canadian markets like Montreal and Vancouver.

“We think it will have such a good impact that it will be used globally in the future,” he says.