Social media plays a key role for US SMB biz

SAN FRANCISCO, US: Social networking medium is serving as a platform to promote business aggressively for Small business owners in US.

A new online survey of more than 2,000 US small business by Internet2Go, an Opus Research advisory service, and MerchantCircle, found that roughly 45 per cent of respondents have a presence or profiles on Facebook and Twitter to promote their businesses.

The survey targeted the most frequent content-publishers among MerchantCircle`s small business members said a press release.

"We've known anecdotally that small businesses are using social media sites like

Facebook and Twitter but these numbers are surprising," said Greg Sterling, senior analyst Internet2Go.

He further added that the conventional wisdom is that SMBs are unsophisticated but they're adopting social media tools en masse it appears, because there are fewer barriers to entry than other forms of online marketing.

The survey presented a broad range of questions about traditional and online marketing and asked SMBs to indicate the relative effectiveness of different media they were using to promote their businesses, said the release.

The survey findings noted that 79 per cent of respondents report annual marketing budgets of less than $5,000 per year with the 44 per cent spending "less than $1,000" annually on advertising and marketing.

The top two complaint regarding online marketing the top two were that it was too expensive (26 per cent) and time constraints (15.9 per cent)

75 per cent of the respondents said that they monitor online reviews of their business. The most common method was by visiting specific review websites (47 per cent) and by searching on their business name (44 per cent).

According to the finding, despite its popularity social media showed the biggest gap between SMB adoption and perceived effectiveness as a marketing platform.

"We believe the behavior exhibited by these small business owners is a pre-cursor of things to come - that small business owners will increasingly forgo expensive advertising options and embrace publishing their unique content across various social media outlets," said Darren Waddell vice president and MerchantCircle.

 "While MerchantCircle typically focuses on helping businesses get online for the first time, we are excited to be an important part of the social media strategies employed by this new segment of merchants," he added.