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Has the Bad Economy Driven Social Media Growth By Small Businesses?

February 25th, 2010 | KikScore & KikReport,News,Online & Small Business Resources,Small Business,Social Media | 1 Comment »

As you all know, we at KikScore are passionate about small business.  We take every opportunity to hype small business as much as we can.  Well a very interesting study was released last week about the state of American small businesses.   The very informative  Small Business Success Index (SBSI), sponsored by Network Solutions and the Center for Excellence in Service at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business had some interesting findings  (The SBSI can be found at www.growsmartbusiness.com).  In particular, there are some very informative findings in the study about the growth of social media use and adoption by small businesses over the last year and especially during the time of our rough economy.  Here are just a few of the key findings in that area:

  • Social media adoption by small businesses has doubled from 12% to 24% in the last year.
  • 75% surveyed have a company page on a social networking site
  • 61% use social media for identifying and attracting new customers
  • 57% have built a network through a site like LinkedIn
  • 45% expect social media to be profitable in the next twelve months

What may this mean?  One theory is that as we went through the rough economic times over the last 18 months, small business may have decided to slow down traditional spending on marketing and focused on devoting more time and resources on using free marketing tools like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn.  While we know that these are not really “free”, because there is a precious value that is associated with the time that small businesses spent using these tools, nevertheless the low cost marketing alternatives that these tools offer may have really proved to be great options during leaner times.  And that is could very well be why we are seeing this growth in small business social media adoption.

I can tell you this, at KikScore as we have described in some previous posts social media has really been the core driving force of our marketing efforts and it will continue to be in the future. As an example, everyone of the links to the tools mentioned above actually goes to a KikScore social media property.  In fact, just yesterday we set up a Flickr page.  We have used each of these tools instead of spending our precious cash on traditional marketing efforts.  The SBSI findings seem to indicate that we are part of a growing group of businesses that are doing just that.

I do wonder whether these trends will continue as the economy hopefully starts to pick up.  What do you think is the reasons behind this growth in social media that was found in the study?

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One Response

  1. BizSugar.com says:

    Has the Bad Economy Driven Social Media Growth By Small Businesses?…

    Article covers the findings of a new study on small business that reports social media growth over the last year. We examine whether it may be due to the bad economy….

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