Vertical
Response (VR) work with small businesses and they asked
500 of their clients about their use of social media.
The
lessons Massiv have taken from this research is that: small businesses are
struggling to keep on top of social media; they’re sticking with the
established (essentially Facebook and Twitter) sites and are slow to move to
Pinterest or Google+; content is valued, but finding the time to produce it is
a problem, and companies are willing to shell out for software that helps them
manage their social media marketing.
Let’s
go a little further into the detail then. It’s worth bearing in mind that the
respondents to this survey were willing to pay for the services of a specialist
digital marketing firm so we can assume they’re quite web aware already.
When
it comes to that precious time, 43% of businesses were spending more than six
hours on their social media. The majority of those – a quarter – spent between
six and 10 hours and only seven per cent spent more than 21 hours.
Business
owners were spending much less of their own time on social media, but fully one
third of them wanted to spend less of it.
It
won’t be news to find that two thirds of respondents were spending more time on
social media marketing this year than last.
There
are two giants in social media and business use reflects that with 90% of VR’s
survey group using Facebook and almost 70% of them maintaining a Twitter feed.
Pinterest, LinkedIn and Google+ are, for the moment, dragging far behind.
Blogging
is still popular, with 55% of VR’s small businesses posting to their own blog
and 16% of them spending more than three hours a week doing so.
That
ties in with the finding that sourcing content and then posting it takes up
most of the time spent on social media. Answering questions takes up the
smallest amount of this social media time, less than is spent on checking out
the competition’s online efforts.
As
well as time, businesses are spending more cash on their social media. In this
survey four times as many businesses have upped their social media budgets as
have cut them.
If
there’s help available – and we recently wrote about Adobe’s new social media management system – then businesses are willing to spend on it. Thirty six per
cent of businesses paid for social media publishing or analytic tools and of
these more than half spent more than $26 a month on them.
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