eMarketer shared an interesting piece of research from the University of Maryland’s business school this week.
The survey looked at the use of social media tactics by small business.
The key takeaway: Small businesses are rapidly adopting social media. 75% have created a company presence on sites like Facebook and 69% say that they actively post status updates and articles of interest on those sites.
Twitter was used by about one quarter of the respondents, while almost 40% say that they blog.
This is an explosion of activity from the SMB sector. It makes sense: social media tools are easy to use and internet users are spending more time on social media sites than any other venue. The SMB social media adopters are just following their customers.
by drm on February 23, 2010
What’s the demographic sweet spot for users of social networks? Not what you think. According to a study released by Pingdom, a web monitoring provider, 25% of users of social networking sites are between 35 and 44, and 57% of the users are older than 35.
This is a mainstream media audience with significant purchasing power and an investment in social tools.
A breakdown of age distribution by leading social network sites is even more instructive. Bebo and MySpace are the youngest sites, each with more than 40% of their users under 24. Facebook is one of the most balanced sites in terms of age distribution. Twitter, Delicious, LinkedIn and Classmates.com skew the oldest.
The older-skewing sites, interestingly, are focused largely on content-sharing or connecting. The design of LinkedIn, for instance, is highly focused on organizing your professional information, but doesn’t give a full-spectrum of communications tools.
The second chart is a little misleading, in that is doesn’t reflect the dominance of Facebook in terms of members and audience.
The data was aggregated using Google Ad Planner.
