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According to a survey conducted for Citibank Small Business, 75% of small businesses revealed that they have not found social media sites, such as Facebook and LinkedIn helpful in generating leads or business expansion.


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Written by ShawnHessinger
954 days ago

Ha! No, Steve. Not too frank. As always, thanks for your observations. However, as I said above, nearly 100 percent of my client base has come from social media. Not from chamber memberships or traditional networking or advertising but from social media. Now, I should probably make the point that since I'm in the blogging business this is not necessarily surprising and that since most of my clients are engaged in selling online services or attracting traffic to online communities etc. this makes perfect sense. However, the fact is that more and more entrepreneurs are seeing the value of social media and are growing their businesses in the process. I can't and WON'T say that every business can be grown this way. Any more than anyone can point to anything that will absolutely grow someone else's business. I can only say that it has definitely grown some businesses and is a viable marketing option at very low cost that many particularly online entrepreneurs cannot afford to ignore. If you would consider paying for television or newspaper advertising why would you not consider investing in social media marketing which is much less costly. Also, unlike traditional advertising, social media has the added benefit of being a business networking tool, so you can meet not only customers but future partners, too. (By the way, I wouldn't be at all surprised if you got some networking and business benefits out of your social media activity here.) I want to open this discussion to a broader audience so will be adding it to our Twitter feed @bizsugar.
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Written by SteveRogersCFA
954 days ago

Congratulations to small business owners for seeing through the hype that social media grows your business. In most cases, it's a distraction that misses the value of real marketing. I don't have anything against the medium, if people like to blog, or go on facebook, or twitter--that's fine as a hobby. But telling people it can grow your business is as misleading as telling a business owner he can grow his business by drinking beer, watching football, or having sex. Hope I wasn't too frank there.
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Written by ShawnHessinger
955 days ago

Agreed. I think there may also be built in biases here based on who took the survey and what kinds of businesses they asked to participate. What if I took the same survey and included mostly Web-based businesses? I would be certain to get a very different answer.
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Written by m4bmarketing
955 days ago

Shawn I just read that this was just a part of a larger study and not focused on small business and social media.
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Written by m4bmarketing
955 days ago

The problem with this survey and others is that the sample size is too small and they do not provide the breakdown of those sampled. The results may or may not be right, but you can't tell from the survey. This means you can't draw conclusions and state them as facts.

It would be good if someone actually did a proper survey that is detailed so not to mislead people and stating results as fact when they are statistically representative.
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Written by JimmiAmbrose
955 days ago

How can that be true? Why would movie companies, celebrities and the like be participating in these types of social media if they were inaffective? I disagree with that number as well.
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Written by ShawnHessinger
956 days ago

I have very little trouble believing this is the case, Willis, and I think the main issue comes down to the question of committing the time needed to do it and do it right. I think I've said this before in other comments, but, if you throw in blogs as part of social media, probably close to 100 percent of my current business has resulted at least in part from some kind of social media marketing...even in cases where I had a previous relationship with the client!
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