Facebook (68.7%) leads among free social media platforms that small and medium businesses (SMBs) use for marketing, according to survey results from Reply!, released October 2012. Google+ is second, used by 49.2%, followed by Twitter (32.8%) and other social platforms (19.1%). Only 18.6% of SMBs report using none. The picture changes considerably when SMBs are asked on which social media platforms they pay for services, though, with about three-quarters saying they don’t pay for any such services. Google+ was a strong first in paid usage, but by just 12.6% of respondents, nearly twice the percentage that pays for Facebook services (6.6%), and nearly 10 times the percentage that pay for Twitter services (1.3%). 10.8% of SMBs pay for services on other social media platforms.
Still, those three-quarters not paying for social media services shows willingness to at least explore them. Some 42.6% of those holdouts say they are very likely to explore these products to promote their businesses within the next 3 to 6 months. Another 37.2% is indifferent, and 20.2% report being very unlikely to even explore those services. Read the rest at MarketingCharts.
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