A survey of 600 small business owners across the United States indicates that 90% are actively engaged in social networking sites and 74% perceive social networking as valuable — if not more valuable — than networking in-person.
When 42% of owners say that 25% of new customers discovered them through sites such as Facebook and Foursquare, it is crucial that your business is online and social.
But the news is not all merry, as 58% of surveyed owners said they struggle with promoting their Facebook pages — if they have a page at all.
The takeaway is clear. You need to be where your customers are. Forget what your competitors are doing, as their customers are different from your customers. You also need to integrate internet communications into your normal routine of business networking.
About Ari Herzog
I am one of those online business owners who have trouble inviting people on my facebook page. The trick is to add lots of potential customers on your personal fb account and then add them to your hotmail or gmail account. Then you can add them to to your facebook page through email invitations. Hope this helps all struggling business owners.
Clearly the Manta survey is flawed and skewed to serve their agenda and re-posting it here is doing the same for this blog. There is no way that small businesses are that involved in SM or are aware at the reported levels. Many small businesses are still quite ignorant about using any form of digital or how to build a customer base with digital tools. The reality needs to be reported rather than hype designed to make business owners feel like they are missing out if they don’t spend money at the sites peddling exaggerations.
You’re so right Ken. Looks like it was an ONLINE survey which right there eliminates all of the small business owners who don’t have time to read marketing stuff online and respond to online surveys.
It’s not a representative sampling of small business owners and shouldn’t be trumpeting the results as if it is.
Very interesting insights…nothing that nobody suspected already, but having real figures really help to understand many things. The only problem I see in this report is, how well those businesses are performing on their Social Media strategies? My experience tells me that although many are currently using SM, they way they are doing it is not effective at all…. I’d love to see more information about this.
Thank you for the post.
While pleasantly surprised at the survey, I also find the figures difficult to believe as to actual ‘performance’ on social sites. My concern is that small business may have a Facebook page, Twitter, LinkedIn or other platform account but are not in fact interacting but more likely posting in as in press release format about company news and products.
I personally will go to a company website for news or product information and rarely follow a company Facebook page in my stream as I find them mostly ‘noise’. Interaction is minimal and uninteresting. This philosophy excludes social media companies, which I do follow.
I think while small businesses today think having an online presence is important, they do not really know how to go about making it work for them. In fact, because they are business owners, they’d rather put more effort into building their business (i.e. making sales) than spending time experimenting on social platforms. Instead, they will probably try creating a Facebook page, a blog, etc and say it doesn’t work after a month.
Of course, this does not apply to every small business there is out there
I am not in the US but I don’t find this surprising at all. Many small businesses are quite knowlegeable about social media networking and many of them are using it quite effectively.
However, most of them that I spoke to said that they value networking in person more valuable. Thanks for sharing.
Okay, here’s the thing for me: This seems like business owners regurgitating what they think of as “common knowledge.” I suspect that the majority of these business owners are “active” in the sense that they are “pretty sure that their cousin Phil set up that Facebook page, right?”
I would love to see metrics on the actual frequency of updates, and concrete definitions on what “active” means.
Interesting data. I too have found many small business owners who don’t have a website yet, never mind participating on SM. I’m thinking it would be handy to have a case study of a small business who previously had zero online presence, then over a relatively short period of time created a very valuable online presence with significant ROI. I think I’ll start working on this, but if anyone out there has one I’d love to see it.
This data tracks much more easily than the infographic suggests; the logic is sound.
It is far easier for a SME to be agile and adapt to the changing customer demographic, and the expectations and requirements that come with that – there are far fewer encumbent processes that prevent that rapid change turnaround.
Large companies face a centralised process, usually with a gatekeeper who is resistant to change by virtue of their role. Trying to enable a new channel of communication is much easier when you are a business of a few to a few hundred. Not only that, but every channel you can offer to customers adds revenue and service – largest businesses don’t necessarily *need* that revenue as they are so well known that people will pursue their services through standard, well-established methods.
This is a carbon copy of what we saw with the advent of email; small companies were suing email as a matter of course long before the larger companies offered this as a communication channel to their own customers.
The larger issue here is the transience of the SocMed environemnt; MySpace became Facebook became Twitter became Tumbr… there is such a quick rotation of SocMed, and – crucially – no precident set for how to handle SocMed in the right way.
Until someone takes the plunge and does this with aplom, the largest companies see SocMed as too risky and lacking the prerequisite supporting evidence.
I don’t find it hard to believe that 90% of small businesses use social media. I would expect that 100% of those struggle to do it well, or at least near 100%. Thanks for providing additional insight into this.
A survey of 600 business owners from across the U.S. is too small a sample to be deemed credible. The 58% of surveyed owners who admitted they “struggle with promoting their Facebook pages — if they have a page at all,” is the more telling statistic, and, based upon the requests I receive for Facebook business page management, the more accurate representation of small business. Leaving a page unattended is worse than not having one at all. Don’t dive in unless you have the time to devote to monitoring and making it engaging. It’s SOCIAL Media, not MARKETING Media.
Very informative but somewhat at odds with other recent surveys. Problem is whose data do you believe. Surprised no one challenged some of the facts from Manta. Hard to believe that 97% of consumers have internet access and check out vendors prior to purchases. From that point on I was skeptical of the article.
A very interesting survey, but I’m not sure how valid the data is. As CMO at Fishbowl, we just did a survey of our customer’s social media usage and habits. They are small businesses. We had about a 94% reliability based on the sample size relative to our customer base. Our results show far less understanding, engagement and business usage. Depending on the social media platform, we saw between 50% to 70% of our customers using social media one time a week or less, with “Don’t Use” being the highest scoring group. I would love to see the methodology behind this Manta SMB survey.
Social Media is nothing more than a tool and like any tool, you have to use it properly and in the right context to make it work. What social media has really done is increase an organizations ability to reach a large audience at relatively low opportunity cost. But, if you aren’t reaching people that influence your business growth than it’s the same as being in car manufacturing and going to a chef’s conference. You may learn a few things, may even pick up a few sales, but overall it’s less beneficial to your business than visiting a car show.
i’m not living in US but this information is important for me. i also build samll business company in my country. and i use facebook to promote my products and gain customers.