Survey: Facebook Is The Most Popular Site To Market On For Local Business Owners

The results of a MerchantCircle survey targeting small business owners showed the prominence of social media in the local marketing mix, especially marketing on Facebook.  When asked which marketing channels the businesses leveraged, the most popular answer was “the creation of a profile on a social network”  with 40.9% of the vote.  The creation of a social profile beat out traditional marketing methods, like print newspapers (21.7%), print yellow pages (20.0%) and local radio (7.5%), as well as digital marketing channels, like email marketing (37.1%), local review sites (25.9%) and online yellow pages (21.8%).

Maybe the biggest surprise of the survey results were the websites/services the businesses were using to promote their business.  Facebook was far and away the most popular site, with 65.7% of businesses using the popular social networking site for marketing.  The popularity of Facebook topped the use of Google by over 12%, and more than doubled the usage of marketing on Twitter.

The MerchantCircle results also showed that the SMBs marketing on Facebook weren’t limited to just creating company pages.  22% of the companies have used Facebook Ads to promote their business, and of those 64.9% would use it again.

The main reasons that the companies would use Facebook Ads again:

• Facebook Ads are easy to use
• Businesses can pause according to their budget

Some of the reasons that the local SMBs stopped using Facebook ads:

• They didn’t acquire new customers
• It was too expensive

A few items to know about the businesses surveyed: the average budgets were on the smaller side (39.5% under $1,000 and 21.4% with budgets of $1,000 to $2,000) and almost 78.2% of the businesses were very small (between 1 and 4 employees).  For more information on polled company budgets and other marketing results see the full MerchantCircle report.