Facebook will soon start letting small businesses in emerging markets sell to customers for free through their Facebook pages, the social media company said on Wednesday. The move is Facebook's latest foray onto online commerce in emerging markets. The company launched a service last year allowing some merchants to sell items through paid ads on Facebook's app. The latest service will instead be free, and users can view products through merchants' own Facebook pages.

Facebook hopes that more businesses in emerging markets will eventually decide to become paying advertisers.

Facebook has currently about 3 million active advertisers. But there are more than 60 million businesses worldwide using its service that can set up pages for free in an attempt to reach more customers out of Facebook's 1.7 billion global monthly users.

Southeast Asia is Facebook's fastest-growing region for users, but it still makes far more money off users in the United States and Canada.

Facebook has been trying to expand its user base by building internet-beaming drones to connect people who have never had access to the internet.