Small Business Facebook And Twitter Use Growing Fast!

Received a tidbit from a friend of mine citing a Merchant Circle survey showing some amazing numbers and something I have hit on with a few posts lately. More and more businesses are starting to understand the use of social media for use in directly connecting with their customers, here are a couple direct quotes from the survey results:

The online survey of 2,403 of MerchantCircle’s small-business members, conducted in September, found that 45% also have a presence on Facebook and Twitter with the express intent of promoting their businesses.

45 percent is a pretty amazing number in my mind, although it is pretty common for large corporations to start to take advantage of new technology (although not always in the most effective manner) it is very uncommon for smaller businesses to take advantage of it. What becomes very important to them is how they integrate this into their larger web presence, i.e. tying their website into their social media presence.

And another quote:

Internet2Go and MerchantCircle attributed this to the ease and low cost of participating in social media. Of the small businesses polled in the survey, 79% reported annual marketing budgets of less than $5,000 per year, with 44% spending less than $1,000 annually.

Now, this was a really interesting piece, the ease of use statement is interesting simply because most small businesses consider the Internet a very technical experience and that turns them away from using various marketing methods associated with it.

On another note, if you are investing in domain names in many cases they would likely look at anything web related as a marketing expense, if you think you are selling a domain name to a small business (which are the majority of potential customers) at large sums then you may want to think about their budgets a bit.