Why Small Businesses and Entrepreneurs Must Use Social Media

A couple of days back I received some Marketing Charts from HubSpot. Here are some stats I found very useful for small businesses and entrepreneurs to know. Keep in mind that most of these numbers are from U.S. web users but with the internet aren’t you selling/offering services to the world? :) (and India is headed here in the future so better start early!)

• Social media site users spend an average of 5.4 hours a month engaged in networking sites.


• 53.5 billion minutes per month spent on Facebook


• The average Facebook user spent seven hours, 46 minutes on the site monthly


• 734.2 million unique visitors to Facebook.com globally in June 2011, an increase of 33% from the previous year. Twitter.com comes second reaching 144.4 million visitors (up 56%). LinkedIn.com is fourth with more than 84 million visitors


• Facebook, has an average monthly audience of more than 140 million vs its nearest competitor Blogger with 50 million. That means Facebook reaches 70% of active internet users.


• From 9% of US market share of visits, Facebook has now reached about 65%. YouTube has gone from 9% to 20% and is steadily climbing. Twitter and LinkedIn seem to be staying constant at 2 to 3%.


• Globally Europe leads in the average hours spent on social networking sites by 38.1%. N. America has 21.4% and Asia-Pacific has 16.5%.


• According to the 2011 American Customer Satisfaction Index Facebook scores the lowest satisfaction score. Google on the other-hand was one of the highest scoring companies.


• In just one week, Google+ went from ranking as 54th most visited site to 8th place.


• Women make up majority of visitors to social networks, and people aged between 18-34 have the highest concentration of visitors among age groups.


• Mobile users accessing social networks on the phone in the older generation (+55) have doubled since last year.


• 41% of both video and search ad viewers have taken some type of action from an, while only 28% of social media ad viewers were inspired to act.


• 63% of Facebook users what something in return when ‘Like’ing a page.


• 80% of social network users prefer to connect to brands via Facebook.


• 6 in 10 online shoppers say user-generated customer product reviews have a good impact on their buying behavior


• An average of 29%, that's 3 of 10 consumers seek buying advice.

That’s a lot of numbers but it’s clear that for now Facebook cannot be ignored. Customers are talking and connecting on Facebook and companies need to be there engaging with them or they will be missing out! YouTube and videos are a great way to engage with your audience and its steadily growing in usage. Not to be left out is Google+. I’d like to see how it fares a year from now; instinct says it’s just gonna keep climbing the usage charts – so get your Google+ Corporate Page Now!

You can download the entire report at Hubspot.