A few weeks ago 2500 small business owners answered a survey question “If you had to put all your marketing time and budget into only one channel, what would it be?”. About 400 of them reported that they’ll focus on Social Media Marketing as the primary marketing venue in 2012.
Yet from the entire survey responses, many report that they do use social media to promote their business at the moment. A lot of them actually.
From the chart, we can see that from the 23 listed social media sites, only a handful get little attention. Most of the businesses are familiar with social media marketing opportunities and seem to be using them to some extent.
The top 3 positions, unsurprisingly, are set aside for:
- Facebook, 70% of businesses have used it to promote their services,
- Google, 55% of businesses use it for promotion
- LinkedIn, 52% of business owners use it to spread the word
In other words, two out of three business owners are on Facebook, and every second business owner is active on LinkedIn. Not bad.
To my surprise, only one out of three business owners is active on Twitter and local sites such as Yahoo Local, CitySearch, and Yellowbook.
One in 5 uses YouTube (read: Video Marketing) as a marketing venue.
So what are we to make out of this data, really?
Social Media Activity Advice
Facebook activity is closing in on the critical mass of 80% when statistics analysts say a Disruptive Event occurs. In other words, we’re about to see Facebook as the no-brainer social activity for anyone doing business today. LinkedIn is still far away, but considering that it’s only 1/8 of Facebook’s population, percentage-wise it has a lot greater business impact, which is not surprising since LinkedIn is a business-oriented social network.
So make sure you join us all on LinkedIn and make the best of it. Look me up, I’m an open networker.
Geo-Localization Of Websites
Localization seems to be a concept that only a third of the business population understands and uses. Google has implemented localization pointers in their ranking algorithm, but it seems that businesses aren’t overly interested to use this change and make a stronger claim on their geographical location.
As people get more search-savvy, search queries have grown from 3-5 to 4-7 words per search query. These extra words are likely to be geographical in nature. So, perhaps we should all make it a conscious effort in 2012 to make our websites more geo-sensitive.
Video Marketing On The Daily Menu
Consider this: In SEO, it takes only 10 businesses to have a better ranking to push your website onto Google’s second page of search results. If you take in consideration that only 20% of people ever dare to use YouTube and similar video marketing sites, it’s easy to put two and two together and realize that video marketing yields tons of SEO ROI.
So don’t be camera-shy. Think YouTube. If nothing else, create a PPT and record the audio presentation on top of it.
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