Fastest Growing Small Businesses Increasing Social Media Use

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Fastest Growing Small Businesses Increasing Social Media Use

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I came across an interesting recent study of social media adoption for small business. The study was conducted by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. The study is based on a survey of companies included on the Inc. 500 list. The Inc. 500 consists of the fastest growing privately held companies in the U.S. My thinking is that if you're working on growing a small business, this is a pretty good list of companies to learn from (after all, they must be doing something right). [Disclaimer: My former company was on the Inc. 500 list three times, so I may have a bit of a positive bias.]

Here are the quick highlights from the report that I found interesting. I encourage you to read the full report if you can -- it's interesting, and not that long.

The Inc. 500 And Social Media

1. The 2007 study found small business outpaced bigger companies in their use of social media. Then, only 8% of the Fortune 500 were blogging compared to 19% of the Inc. 500.

2. The current study shows that just 11.6% of the Fortune 500 currently have a public blog. An astounding 36% of Inc. 500 companies are blogging.

3. The social media technology that is the most familiar to the Inc. 500 is social networking. 57% of the respondents claim to be "very familiar" with social networking vs. 42% last year.

4. Just over 25% reported social media was very important to their business/marketing strategy last year. That number has risen to 44% this year.

5. All six forms of social media in studied have had increased adoption/usage amongst the Inc. 500. These include Message/Bulletin Boards, Social Networking, Online Video, Blogging, Wikis and Podcasting.

6. In 2007, 26% felt that social media was "very important" to their business and marketing strategy. That rose to 44% in one year.

Clearly, fast-growing small businesses are increasingly interested in and using social media. How about your business? Are you starting to get into social media? Have you already benefited?

Would love to hear your thoughts and questions in the comments.

By the way, if you're looking to connect with other marketers online, you can request access to the free Pro Marketers Group on LinkedIn. We also have a marketing group on Facebook.

Posted by Dharmesh Shah on Tue, Jul 22, 2008 @ 09:30 AM

COMMENTS

Urbane Apartments is a small property management company with hip, boutique-style apartments in the midwest, and we've now elimated nearly ALL traditional paid advertising and are reaching out to our residents and new prospects via social media. Result thus far? Our traffic continues to stream in--in fact, our new traffic is up 6% from last year. And, again, we no longer do any traditional, paid advertising.

Social networking is powerful stuff.

posted on Tuesday, July 22, 2008 at 10:10 AM by Diane Sawinski

We've had great success with blogging. We've been at it 18 months now and find it a great way to interact with customers, thought leaders and prospective customers as we bring our thoughts and ideas to the community.

Plus, it's a huge help with SEO.

posted on Tuesday, July 22, 2008 at 10:10 AM by Laura

The University of Massachusetts maintains a small business development center in Fall River, MA. They offered a series of courses last spring that included "Get your customers buzzing through internet marketing".

One of the more important items that we came away with was the reference to HubSpot's website grader and the services offered by HubSpot.

We took the advice and updated our web site and jumped into the "social media". I surprised my children when they found out that I am on Facebook! Since that time we have added multiple links to our site.

posted on Tuesday, July 22, 2008 at 10:22 AM by Michael E. Perrault, P.E.

Previous poster, Laura, you're right. Activity on the social networking sites nicely boosts SEO! As does Hubspot's Website Grader--thanks Hubspot for this great, free tool. I use it about twice/month to improve http://www.urbaneapts.com, and we've seen terrific results.

posted on Tuesday, July 22, 2008 at 10:28 AM by Diane Sawinski

Wow - interesting article. Thanks for sharing, Please share more about this.

posted on Tuesday, July 29, 2008 at 6:28 AM by Small Business Web Design

I find it interesting (but not surprising) that smaller, privately held companies are adopting social media and networking easier than the Fortune 500 companies.

Being a small business, I believe I have a lot more flexibility to initiate change than do larger companies. We also are probably willing to experiment with newer ideas to help gain a competitive advantage.

I guess if the small businesses of today become a lot of the big businesses of tomorrow then we should watch out because blogging and social networking will be used everywhere.