3 Things You Should Know About Small Business: July 31

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- What's happening in small business today?

1. This startup is de-friending Facebook. Long Island music industry startup Limited Run has decided to remove its Facebook(FB) page after starting a spat with the social media company that quickly became national news. The startup claims that Facebook was charging them for ad clicks that weren't coming from actual people, according to a Mashable recap of the virtual war of words, and clicks.

"Facebook was charging us for clicks, yet we could only verify about 20% of them actually showing up on our site," Limited Run was quoted as posting on its Facebook page.

Limited Run hosts stores for labels and artists. The allegation is timely, given a recent report by the BBC that alleges Facebook has worked with fake spam accounts.

Facebook told the Los Angeles Times that it is investigating the allegations made by Limited Run and described it as a "miscommunication."

2. Businesses with fewer than 20 employees had weak hiring in July. According to estimates from Intuit(INTU) Payroll's July Small Business Indexes, small businesses created just 35,000 jobs in the four-week period ending July 23. Intuit said 40,000 new jobs were created in June, based on revised numbers.

The data is based on approximately 82,000 of Intuit's small businesses customers.

Unfortunately, Intuit's revenue index, launched in May, didn't show a much better picture of the economy. Overall revenue declined in June (the index trails the hiring index by a month) by 0.5% from the previous month. Among the industries tracked by the index, none saw an increase, whereas construction and real estate had modest gains in May.

The construction industry did see the smallest decline in June. It accounts for about 8% of employment among all companies and roughly 20% of employment for small companies, so any change in this sector is important, Intuit says.

The accommodation and food services sector saw the biggest revenue decline, at 0.7%, followed by the retail industry, at 0.5%.