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 22, 2010
I found a few data points about U.S. internet usage in January from Nielsen, the media research firm, very interesting.
The first data set looked at the top 10 web brands in January.
Google was the most trafficked site in the month, with more than 153 million unique visitors, but Facebook was the most used site in the month, with the average user spending 7 hours on Facebook, more than three times as long as any other site.
All told, users spent nearly 816 hours on Facebook in January, compared to just 193.2 million hours on Google. That’s four times as long.
Interestingly, time on Facebook grew at a faster rate than total visits.
Nielsen also released some composite statistics on U.S. internet usage.
The average user looked at more than 2600 web pages each month, but spent less than a minute on each page. That butterfly effect makes the 7 hours spent on Facebook even more pronounced.
The statistic made me wonder just how much the average web surfer is worth in revenue every month. I can’t think of any way to reliably build up a figure. To calculate it, you’d have to be able to estimate the average revenue per page for the web. If you figure that the average revenue per thousand users for a media enterprise is $25 — a guess that assumes three ad units with an average CPM of $7 — then our average surfer is worth $65 in ad revenue every month.
Assuming that internet access is costing about $75, then the average web users accounts for $130 per month in advertising and access charges.
Not a lot of revenue to go around.
