Small Business Discovers Social Media

Last time I talked about the growing usage of Twitter as a business tool. The new “Social Media Marketing Industry Report” (pdf)
by Michael A. Stelzner, sponsored by the Social Media Success Summit 2009, validates the importance of Twitter and suggests how social media is re-shaping the manner in which small business is conducted.

The results of the study are based on a survey of 880 participants, 70 percent of whom are small business owners. Nearly half the participants are sole proprietors. Almost 80 percent of them are ages 30 through 59, and more than half are female. (This last statistic is evidence of the changing demographic of business ownership – and also may in part help to explain the increasing popularity of social media as a business tool.)

Social media is being used by 88 percent of the respondents for business marketing, but it’s a brand new tactic: Close to three-quarters of the respondents said they’ve been using social media for marketing for just a few months.

Generating exposure for a business was seen to be the primary benefit of social media. Increasing traffic and building new business partnerships were next in line. Interestingly, more than half of the respondents said social media improved their search engine rankings.

One in two marketers found social media helped in generating qualified leads. More than half of the marketers surveyed said social media generated qualified leads after only a few months and an investment of as little as six hours per week. That’s an encouraging statistic given the time and money it typically takes to acquire new business.

The most-used social media for marketing, ranked in order, were Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn, and Facebook. “Blogs” of course, is a catch-all category. eMarketer recently reported that nearly 28 million U.S. Internet users (about 14 percent of the total Internet population) maintain blogs. Blogging is one of the most fundamental changes in the way businesses have re-oriented their traditional marketing activities.

There was a time not too long ago when small business owners were just getting around to launching websites. Only recently have they learned how to make the most effective use of email. Now they are behind the eight ball if they are not blogging. Soon they’ll be left in the dust if they’re not tweeting.

The irony of this situation is that small business owners used to spend their time schmoozing at bars and industry meetings to make social contacts that could result in business leads. Today, it seems, they have to spend more time engaged in online social networking to do essentially the same thing.

It’s not such a stretch to see the two forms of socializing coalesce. I remember years ago, during the days of Palm Pilot popularity, when business meetings would start with people zapping each other their vCards (electronic business cards). Now vCards are a standard email attachment and text messaging is as ordinary as a voice call. Business owners receive and send email and access the Web from their Blackberries. They can just about run their businesses on their iPhones.

The benefits of online social networking seem to hold even greater promise than face-to-face social networking, or conventional marketing, for that matter. For one thing, business owners are investing primarily time instead of precious dollars. For another, they can reach far beyond the limitations of geography in gaining awareness and generating leads. Also, the potential for online referrals is huge. Online socializing may be a different method – but it could well become the preferred method of one-to-one marketing in the future.