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National
Small Business Week 2011
started
today (Monday, May 16) and will
continue through Friday. The annual
event recognizing the contributions of
small businesses to America's economic
well being has been held every year
since it was established through a
Presidential proclamation in 1963. A
highlight of the week will be a three
day conference
that will be held at |
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the
Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington,
D.C. Wednesday through Friday (May
18-20). In turn, one of the most
anticipated sessions during the
conference will be a Social
Media Forum Thursday morning
at 10am. |
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In
an enlightening Online Media Daily
article
at MediaPost.com today, author Les
Luchter shared some revealing statistics on
how many small businesses are utilizing social
media marketing vs. other means of promoting
their businesses. Luchter's information came
from a survey of more than 1,500 small
businesses that was conducted over the past two
months by Constant
Contact, a leading small business
marketing resource (as an aside, I take a
special interest in small to medium sized
business (SMB) developments because the vast
majority of domains I sell go to SMB end users
and I'm sure that is true for many other
portfolio owners as well). Within
the domain community there has been considerable
debate over whether or not the rise of social
media (and having that powerful new tool
available for businesses to promote themselves)
would one day supplant domains. I don't
think that will happen and the data from this
new survey supports that, showing that while
more and more businesses are adopting social
media as a marketing tool, it is just one of
many tools they are using and that the one
they rely on most is marketing through their
own websites. 95%
of the respondents said they rely on website
marketing. 91% of them said they use
email marketing and the third most popular tool
is print advertising used by 77% of the
small businesses polled. The fact that website
marketing is now used by considerably more
businesses than print advertising is a
remarkable testament to how far the web has come
vs. traditional media over the last few
years.
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Graphic: Renjith
Krishan / FreeDigitialPhotos.net |
Social
media marketing now ranks fourth but is quickly
closing on print with 73% of
the businesses reporting they use social
media to promote themselves (the next
largest shares went to online
advertising used by 69% of the
respondents and event marketing used by 53%).
Social media marketing will continue
to grow because of those businesses
not yet using social media, 62%
of them said they plan to start doing so
within the next year. |
Among
those who are using social media, Facebook
was easily the most popular choice, used by 95%
of those businesses, far outdistancing Twitter
(used by 60%), LinkedIn (used by 58%),
YouTube and other video sharing (used by 45%)
and daily/local deal services (used by 23%).
The social media business users also rated
Facebook as the most effective tool with 82%
saying Facebook was effective. 73% said
that about video sharing and 55% felt
daily/local deals were effective. Twitter and
LinkedIn brought up the rear - in a tie -
with 47% of businesses using social media
saying those are effective tools. It
seems pretty clear to me that nothing is likely
to replace websites (and by extension the
importance of domain names) any time soon. Small
business entrepreneurs are smart enough to use
every affordable tool at their disposal and they
continue to say that their websites remain the
most important weapon in their arsenals.
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