According to the BIA Kelsey’s 2010 Local Commerce Monitor, the use of social media by small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) who spend at least $25K in online marketing/year has risen dramatically over the past year.
As I mentioned in my post on The Local Reviews Ecosystem, the focus on customer engagement via reviews and social media is going to be the big small biz story of 2011. And while Facebook is clearly dominating the SMB social media pie, I fully expect Twitter to come out with its own SMB product some time next year. The fact that 19% are already using that crazy 140 character contraption shows they have a lot of room for growth.
7 Response Comments
Hi Andrew,
It’s always good to be able to refer to numbers to back up ones opinions when talking to clients so this will be useful data for me to quote.
Do you know if the data are for U.S. only or worldwide?
social media is still in it’s infancy it seems more companies are promoting their facebook page and less their webpage.
Do you know how many bizs were actually surveyed for this? 48% seems like an absurdly high number especially because i read reports that 64% of SMB’s dont have any web presence at all. And with roughly 16 million active bizs in the US i find it hard to believe that 8 million of them are on FB, especially all the lawyers and plumbers.
Andy Leff
Founder
http://www.7mainstreet.com
I don’t remember the exact sample size, but it’s “statistically significant”. Note, these SMBs are those who spend at least $250/month (or something like that) in online marketing. I also think that when it says “Facebook Page” it could mean simply the respondent having a personal Facebook profile.
Whether the respondents reported having a personal Facebook profile or a “..having a facebook page for their business” as the slide says is avery important distiction. What exactly were the SMB’s asked?
Agreed Angus. That said, when SMBs asked if they were doing SEO a few years ago, a huge % said yes even though most were only doing Adwords. So grain of salt needed.
Where does LinkedIn fall in this data? Surely there’s a higher use of LinkedIn than what may be in the Other Social Network category? Also, it’s helpful to know what size you’d define as a “small business.”