Small Business Blog

A report by Econsultancy and Online Marketing Summit attempts to understand how companies are quantifying the value of social media. Admittedly, we did not buy the report, but we did read the 24-page “free sample.” Two statistics jump out:

• 61 percent of companies have tinkered with social media, without jumping in, full board, to a social media strategy
• 13 percent of companies are not doing anything at all

Do these numbers imply that the social media landscape is less competitive than, say, your local phone book or local search results? To answer that question, we’d have to know similar usage data on those other forms of media. One thing’s for sure, the popularity of social media is growing. Facebook traffic, for example, is exploding to the point where this site is the second most popular on the Web. And this means social media is poised to get more competitive over time.

Understanding this, do you think there’s a closing window of opportunity for your small business to secure a position in social media before Twitter, Facebook and others become bogged down with endless clutter, the way search engine results are currently? Could be. Remember when businesses first started launching Web sites? Those who got in early swooped up the domain names and ushered in fundamental changes to entire industries (travel and banking sectors come to mind). It was a lot easier to establish first-page ranking when you weren’t competing with the whole world, right? Those who came on to the Web scene later in the game have struggled to build and maintain visibility under generic key phrases. Could the same thing happen with social media (or has it already)?

So let’s hear it: has your small business committed itself to a social media strategy? If not, are you concerned at all with missing the social media boat?

The Econsultancy survey queried 440 people, 238 of whom were client-side pros and the remainder were outside vendors. The largest business sector represented is retail at 19 percent, followed by publishing at 15 percent. Healthcare, consumer packaged goods, financial services, real estate and travel were represented in roughly equal portions (7-12 percent). The remaining sectors participating were automotive, entertainment, telecom, charity, pharma, public administration, utilities and gaming. Read more about this survey here.