the importance of social media for small businesses  

We recently came across a survey completed by National Small Business Association, they were looking into the importance of social media for small business owners and started the investigation by looking at how many business owners used social media and which social media platforms they used.

Here is what they found;

  • 57% of business owners use LinkedIn for business
  • 50% of business owners use Facebook for business
  • 26% of business owners use Twitter for business
  • 24% of business owners use Google+ for business
  • 19% of business owners use YouTube for business
  • 10% of business owners use Blogs for business
  • 6% of business owners use Pinterest for business
  • 2% of business owners use Instagram for business 

Meanwhile, the report found that quite a large 27% of small business owners do not use any form of social media personally or for business.

What this report doesn’t tell us is the sort of businesses and industries that were contacted for the report. Facebook is ideal for B2C businesses and LinkedIn is ideal for B2C so we cannot tell from this report if the businesses included were using the right social media platforms for business, for the right reasons.

However the report did go on to ask the small business owners the reasons they were using social media, each small business owner was given 4 options that they could mark as one (or more) of the reasons their business is on social media. These four options were Business Networking, Keeping In Touch With Friends, Political Advocacy and Other.

While 85% of small business owners using social media for business were doing so for business networking, it seems the other business owners were using social media for social reasons, or perhaps social alongside business networking? The report found that 48% used it for keeping in touch with friends, 14% for political advocacy and a further 8% for reasons of their own choice. 

So now we would like you, dear reader, to ask yourself a question – what is the reason your business is on social media?