9% of SMBs Use Twitter for Marketing

About nine percent of small and medium-sized businesses currently use Twitter to market their businesses, say researchers at BIA/Kelsey.  In addition, 32 percent of SMBs indicated they plan to include social media in their marketing mix in the next 12 months by using a page on a social site such as Facebook, LinkedIn or MySpace.

Furthermore, 39 percent of SMBs plan to include customer ratings or reviews on their own Web sites, and 31 percent plan to include links or ads placed on social sites or blogs.

"Social media is clearly gaining traction among SMB advertisers," says Steve Marshall, director of research and consulting, BIA/Kelsey.

You might not be surprised if any study suggests Twitter is used disproportionately by younger people. What the BIA/Kelsey study suggests it also is used by "younger businesses."

About 16 percent of SMBs in business three years or less say they use Twitter for marketing or promotion. About 11 percent of SMBs in business four to six years say they use Twitter for such purposes.

Some six percent of SMBs in business seven to 10 years say they use Twitter for some form of marketing while just two percent of firms in business for 11 or more years say they do so.

BT: Another Twist on Social Networking

Tradespace is a community platform that allows businesses to interact together and use PayPal to make transactions. It currently features 20,000 largely small business users.

The SME employs 10 million people in the U.K. market, about half of the total private workforce, says Ben Verwaayen, BT CEO. About 24 percent of the U.K. workforce works from home. About 60 pecent start-ups also are home-based.

"They don't want hassle but they want to live in the 21st century," says Verwaayen. "So they want to have the capability to communicate, to delegate, to go out in the world and find supplies, find customers and do that in a way that they concentrate on what they do best," says Verwaayen.

And that's one example of how social networkng can work for small business.