â–¶ Using Social Media to Grow Businesses: A social media marketing industry report released by WhitePaperSource’s Michael Stelzner, titled “How Marketers Are Using Social Media to Grow Their Businesses” and sponsored by the Social Media Success Summit 2009, offers these insights into business development in a 2.0 world:
• The top three questions marketers want answered in terms of social media: What are the best tactics to use? How do I measure the effectiveness of social media? Where do I start?
• Marketers are relatively new to social media: 88% of surveyed marketers are using social media to market their businesses, but 72% have only been doing so for a few months or less.
• Time commitment: 64% use social media for 5-plus hours weekly and 39% use it for 10-plus hours weekly. Business owners were more likely to use social media marketing (90%) than employees working for a business (81%). At least two in three participants found that increased traffic occurred with as little as six hours a week invested in social media marketing.
• Top benefits of social media: The No. 1 advantage cited was generating exposure for their business (81%), followed by increasing traffic (61%) and building new business partnerships (56%).
• Top tools: Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn and Facebook were the top four social media tools used by marketers, in that order. Specifically, Twitter is used by 94% of marketers who’ve been using social media for years, followed closely by blogs (90%).
• Learning curve: When asked what social media tools they are most interested in learning more about, 58% said bookmarking sites such as Delicious. In this vein, 61% of those investing more than 20 hours per week in social media marketing are using social bookmarking sites.
Source: Michael Stelzner