Social Media Works for Small Business

A survey of 3340 largely small business managers and owners finds the respondents believe social media has helped them close business. Some 72 percent  of marketers who have been using social media for more than three years report it had helped them close business. More than half who spend 11 or more hours per week also believe they have gotten the same results.

Of course, that likely is a self-selecting sample. Almost by definition, a business that continues to invest energy and time in social media believes it works.

About 48 percent of the self-employed and small business owners with two or more employees believe they have closed business because of social media.

Even with a minimal time investment, the vast majority of marketers (81% or higher) indicated their social media efforts increased exposure for their business. Owners of small businesses (2 to 100 employees) were more likely than others to report greater exposure was a direct result of using social media. (89 percent of respondents reported benefits).

By spending as little as six hours per week, 52 percent of marketers reported lead generation benefits with social media.

Small businesses were more likely than others to strongly agree that qualified leads were generated (21% strongly agreed, compared to 14% or less with other types of businesses).

Also, a significant percentage of participants strongly agreed that overall marketing costs dropped when social media marketing was implemented. The self-employed (59 percent) and small business owners with two or more employees (58 percent) were more likely than others to see reductions in marketing costs when using social media marketing.

The largest group who took the survey was self-employed (33 percent) followed by people working for a company with up to 100 employees (30 percent). Some 19 percent of people taking the survey worked for businesses with 100 or more employees.


Social Media Marketing Industry Report 2011 from Michael A. Stelzner on Vimeo.


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Social Adoption by Enterprises

What social technologies and tools do enterprises view as most important, and what kind of investments do organizations plan to make in Web 2.0 in the future? This McKinsey presentation tries to answer the questions.  The survey examines business use of 12 technologies and tools: blogs, mash-ups (a Web application that combines multiple sources of data into a single tool), microblogging, peer to peer, podcasts, prediction markets, rating, RSS (Really Simple Syndication), social networking, tagging, video sharing, and wikis.


http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Business_and_Web_20_An_interactive_feature_2431?pagenum=1#interactive

Business Marketing Shifts, Social Gains

Business marketing always embraces activities other than advertising, but there is growing evidence that some amount of advertising budgets are being shifted to other marketing channels, including various types of social media. Outsell estimates that marketing on social networks will grow 43.3 percent in 2010. Forrester Research predicts that B2B firms will spend $54 million on social media marketing in 2014, up from just $11 million in 2009.

And though some business spending is shifting to advertising on social networks, banners, text ads and search advertising, as well as the more targeted advertising being deployed by Facebook and MySpace, is a small portion of B2B marketers’ social spending.

When companies budget for social media marketing in 2010 and beyond, a substantial portion of their expenses will go toward other initiatives, such as creating and maintaining a branded profile page, managing promotions or public relations outreach within a social network, and measuring the effect of a social network presence on brand health and sales, says Evelyn Jung, eMarketer researcher.

In 2009, B2B marketers spent the largest portion of their social media budgets on customer communities, followed by podcasts and blogs. These tactics allow B2B marketers to share more relevant product or service information with their customers than they could with other social tools.

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CEOs, Managers Using Social Media for Work

You might be surprised to learn that social media is being actively used by business managers, including CEOs, to keep track of news and conduct research, in addition to keeping up with friends.

In a recent survey of 337 social media users in North America and Europe, about 84 percent of social media users indicated they use it to keep up to date on news, while 78 percent also indicated they use social media "to get ideas to help me in my job," says Nigel Fenwick, Forrester Research analyst.

Why and How Businesses Use Social Media

Social media marketing is a developing art form. In fact, you almost would find it odd that budgets to support social marketing and mobile social marketing are growing on a fairly widespread basis even though a majority of companies have difficulty measuring the return on investment from social media.

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In fact, according to a recent survey of marketing executives by Econsultancy, 61 percent say their organizations are “poor” (34 percent) or “very poor” (27 percent) at measuring social media ROI.

According to the Econsultancy survey, 61 percent report that they “have experimented with social media, but not done that much.”

A quarter say they are “heavily involved in social media”, while the remaining 13 percent are not engaging with social media at all.

So why are marketers using social and mobile social media? They do so for the same reasons they use other marketing channels: generation of sales and leads as well as softer objectives such as improved brand awareness and reputation.

As an intermediate objective, social media efforts often are measured by their ability to drive traffric to company Web sites. "Increased traffic to a Web site is the business goal that marketers are most likely to be trying to influence through social media marketing," says Econsultancy. Fully 74 percent of companies say they use social media to increase Web site traffic.

"Direct traffic to Web site is by far the metric most commonly used to measure the impact of offsite social media, measured by just under two-thirds of company respondents (63 percent)," says Econsultancy.

More brand recognition (64 percent) is the second most important business objective in terms of impact of social media. A similar proportion of respondents (62 percent) cite better brand reputation. And that might be a big part of the reason why social media is used.

Just over half of companies (56 percent) say that they try to achieve increased sales through social media activity. But only a quarter of companies (24 percent) use sales as a metric for measuring social media effectiveness.