59% of Small Business Owners will be making further investments in Social Media in 2012

Jan. 4, 2012 - PRLog -- Hampshire, UK – 3rd January 2012 - Email marketing specialist, Inbox Insight, recently conducted a survey to an audience of 500 small business owners and MD’s regarding their organisations social media plans and strategies.

Inbox Insight have released the online survey which reveals that 73% of organisations asked currently use social media, and 59% of small businesses will be making further investments in social media in 2012, with just 3% of organisations moving away from online platforms.    

Small businesses are becoming more comfortable with social media marketing, and are beginning to use it more to engage with their customers. Although 24% of people asked said that improved customer engagement was their main priority for using social media within their organisation, 26% state that they want to use it to improve brand awareness.

David Clark, Managing Director at Inbox Insight commented: “Small Businesses have begun to realise how important social media is to organisations. Customers want businesses to interact with them, whether that’s via email, phone or social media platforms. It’s a great example of how small businesses can take advantage of their smaller scale and make a bigger impact through the use of these online tools.”

Facebook remains the platform of choice for small businesses with 55% reporting to use the tool, LinkedIn comes a close second at 48% and Twitter is used by 40% of the respondents. Google+, YouTube and Blogs were all used by 17% of the survey respondents and social bookmarking sites are used by just 3%.

Of the 500 respondents the survey revealed that 135 organisations weren’t currently using social media, however these respondents noted that they will be investing in social media over the next year. When asked why it had not yet been implemented 25% stated that they didn’t have enough knowledge, whilst 25% said they didn’t have the time. Other factors for avoiding the set-up of social media included concerns regarding security (4%) and too many sites and accounts to manage (6%).

Small businesses are learning that social media marketing can help them to grow their customer relationships, 85% invest up to 10% of their marketing spend to social media, and 8% spend up to 20%. Just 0.1% of people asked spend over 50% of their marketing budget on social media.

Small business owners and directors are still focussed on using other forms of digital and direct marketing, namely email marketing, with 49% of respondents saying that they would be interested in whitepapers, guides and email bulletins to assist with their social media strategy.

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Inbox Insight was founded in August 2010 by a group of email direct marketing experts. Between us we have unrivalled experience in providing both Advertiser and Subscriber value, as well as the strongest ethics when it comes to deliverability and legitimacy.

Our bulletin titles enable organisations to communicate information, content and offers to our business community generating high quality profiled sales leads.

Online lead generation has developed hugely over the last 10 years, and we believe that Inbox Insight constitutes the modern flagship in providing high quality subscription based audiences for your marketing campaigns.

Inbox Insight clients include: Google, Blackberry, Microsoft, Vodafone, Xpert HR, Salesforce, Sage and Santander.