A just-released study conducted by the online
marketing firm Vertical Response and reported on in Forbes
concludes that web development for small
businesses are spending more time on social media but struggling with the added
workload it represents. Perhaps as a consequence, most are doing social media
marketing in a vacuum because they’re not tracking results, which means they
have no way of quantifying if their time and effort are paying off.
“Our survey confirms that web development for small businesses understands the value of
social media,” says Vertical Response CEO and founder Janine Popick. “They’re
spending more time doing it, and investing more money into it at a faster rate.
But the extra work will likely lead to time management issues, especially for
the small business owner who’s handling social media on top of all the other
responsibilities of running a company. This implies that small businesses are
in need of tactics and tools now to help them save time.”
The study, conducted among almost 500 Vertical
Response customers, focused on a variety of social media activities ranging
from finding and sharing content to blogging. The firm was interested in
knowing which platforms web development
for small businesses are most active on, their marketing and social media
budgets, and how much they’re spending on tools to manage and analyze social media
efforts.
Web Development for small businesses
includes:
- Two-thirds of web development for small businesses is spending more time on social media today than they did a year ago.
- Forty-three percent of those surveyed spend over six hours per week on social media, 25 percent spend six to ten hours per week and 18 percent spend more than 11 hours per week.
- Face book is still the king of social media in web development for small businesses, with 90 percent reporting that they post there. Nearly 70 percent tweet on Twitter, 50 percent are connected on LinkedIn, 32 percent show up on Google Plus and 29 percent pin on Pinterest.
- One-third of the CEOs, owners and proprietors who responded said they want to spend less time on social media.
- More than half (55 percent) of web development for small businesses operate a blog. Among those that do, 45 percent spend one to three hours to create a post, while 16 percent require more than three hours.
- Respondents ranked the following from most to least time consuming: finding and posting content, learning and education, analyzing efforts, scoping out the competition and responding to questions.
- Some web development for small businesses relies on tools to publish and analyze their social media. Thirty-six percent pay for publishing and analytic tools; 58 percent spend $26 or more per month on it.
Social media
budgets are on the rise, with four times as many web developments for small businesses having increased their
budgets compared to those that have decreased their
budgets. By comparison, only twice as many businesses have increased their
overall marketing budgets.
Conclusion on Web development for small
businesses:
Writing for Forbes, Carol
Tice admitted that she was surprised that fully half of the business owners
said they never use LinkedIn, but for web development for small business, it is
most important factor for web success.
“My experience as a solo
owner of my own freelance writing and coaching business is that LinkedIn is the
online phone book for hiring solopreneurs. Heavyweight companies do searches on
there every day, looking for providers to hire,” she says, adding that it
“seems foolish not to have a presence on LinkedIn, especially when the platform
demands so much less of you than Face book or Twitter. A weekly status update
and maybe a few questions answered or comments made in groups, and you’re
good.”
This is a guest
post by Beth Longware Duff on
Web development for small business. If you would like to write for
ComFuge-A World of Geeks, check our guestposting guidelines.
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Beth Longware Duff is a
professional editor and award-winning writer whose work on a wide variety of
topics like Web development for small
business has been published in print and electronic media and this post is
search engine optimized by Gaurav Sharma. She currently writes on a wide range of topics dealing with electronic payment processing for Merchant Express.
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