How Much Time & Money Do Small Businesses Spend on Social Media Marketing? – Infographic

Published March 1, 2013

SMEs (Small Medium Enterprises) – how much time/budget do they spend on social media?

The team over at Vertical response did some work here looking at 500 small businesses with a view to answering the question – how much budget do they spend on social media?

Their major conclusions for small businesses were:

They are spending more time on social media marketing, but many of them have problems in trying to manage the extra workload.

This must be a major problem. In the ‘olden days’ of SEO you could employ a team from the Indian sub-continent to generate a wide number of links to your website, but this will simply not work any more. The additional content must be pertinent to the business and written in English by an author whose first language is English. In many cases for small businesses, the only person able to write such original and accurate content is …… the business owner himself/herself! And you need content before you can utilise the social media platforms.

Most of them focus on Facebook and Twitter, but the exploitation of Pinterest and Google+ is relatively poor.

Hardly surprising. Pinterest has limited usage except to organisations where images/photos are an integral part of the business. Photographers, designers, fashion are obvious sectors.

As for Google+ – apologies but we see it as a bit of a joke for small businesses at the moment. “Do not waste your time” is our view – except for the adoption of Google Authorship and Google Publishership.

Most recognise the value of adding additional quality content – but time is the issue.

It is almost impossible to utilise social media unless you have good, fresh content. Preferably a blog.

– The blog is the content
– Social media is the vehicle

Many small business owners would prefer to spend less of their time on social media.

Quite understandable. Our recommendation therefore is to use a social media marketing company that have the skills to cost-effectively get to grips with the businesses marketing objectives, and easily write fresh content on behalf of the business. There is no reason that a good relationship between the business owner and the agency can produce a steady stream of good quality content with minimal input from the business owner.