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.

Online Ad Revenue Drops As A Whole But Search Ad Revenue Up

I was just reading an interesting report at Adage.com concerning online advertising revenue results (based on an IAB and PricewaterhouseCoopers report) for the first half of the year and how the economic downturn had affected advertiser spend. I found a few of the numbers interesting in the report, numbers talk so here are a few things to point out:

• Overall Internet advertising spend dropped 5.3 percent to 10.9 billion compared to last years comparable period.
• Search advertising revenue grew by 2 percent.
• Last year search revenue accounted for 44 percent of the overall spend, this year it was 47 percent.
• Digital video ad spend was UP 38 percent.

One thing that really stuck out to me since I just left the telecommunications industry is that telecom ad spending was up 1 percent.

Now, although overall spending was down it was still positive compared to other advertising mediums such as newspaper and radio which have faced even steeper declines in advertising revenue.

Social networking sites have seen a large growth surge in time spent on the site over the first half of the year and revenue has also grown (doubled). Personally I think social media will be of concern to some as people begin to rely on their social network for references to other sites and products and as such SEO consultants and search marketing in general really have to think about what that means for their business. If online revenues doubled for search networks that tells me people are content to stay on Facebook, Twitter, or others and not head to the search engines and suddenly normal Google or Bing search becomes a bit less valuable (don't worry Google is not going anywhere but Facebook and Twitter matter more for search than people may realize).