A recent survey shows that Facebook is the king of social media for small businesses.

I think there’s an interesting study here. Why is Facebook so effective for small businesses? 36% say it’s very effective and 47% say it’s moderately so. That’s 83% who say that Facebook has any level of effectiveness. Is it just because there are 800 million users? Or maybe there’s something more.

By contrast, 70% of the respondents said they don’t use Google+. But the really interesting aspect to this survey is the muddle in the middle.

Only 14% of respondents consider Twitter very effective and 32% say it’s moderately effective. But look at the numbers for other social media services:

• Video sharing - 14% and 23%, respectively
• LinkedIn – 10% and 24%, respectively
• Review sites – 7% and 12%, respectively
• Local/daily deals – 5% and 6%, respectively

What’s interesting is that more small businesses are using Google+ than are using the local deals sites. As Frank Reed, with the hype surrounding the Groupon IPO, you’d think more small businesses were using those websites. But I guess that’s not the case.

And of course, I don’t think anyone is surprised that 81% of surveyed small businesses don’t use MySpace (does anyone still use MySpace?). Evidently so. 3% of respondents claim that it is either very effective or moderately effective.

If you own a small business and you are ready for social media, your best bet is probably Facebook.

Tags: facebook, small business, Social Media

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011 at 10:40 am and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.