Nearly 60% of SMBs on Facebook + Twitter

Palore sent me some SMB data (not a survey) based on crawling and analysis of websites and their social media presence in two categories and two markets: restaurants and spas in Philadelphia and San Diego. I’ve written this up already at Search Engine Land.

As the chart below reflects, Palore found — and this is only SMBs with sites (no “offline SMBs,” no chains) — that 58% of SMBs are on Facebook or Twitter. About twice as many are on Facebook as Twitter. Interestingly the overlap between Facebook and Twitter (in this sample) is only 22%.

Source: Palore

What’s perhaps most interesting about the data is the analysis of engagement. Palore found a broad distribution of Likes and followers, which it took as a proxy for activity and engagement.

Facebook:

• SMBs with fewer than 100 Likes: 38.3 percent
• SMBs with more than 1000 Likes: 16 percent

Twitter:

• SMBs with fewer than 100 followers: 44.5 percent
• SMBs with more than 1000 followers: 18.5 percent

The company assumed that the more Likes and followers the more engaged the audience and the more vibrant the connection between the SMBs and their followers. What we see however is that a big percentage of these “social SMBs” have few followers and Likes. I would infer that these pages are not very active and, as a consequence, Twitter and Facebook are not very effective — for those businesses at the low end.

Palore also examined deals and found that just under 14% of these SMBs had offered one or more deals. On average the number of deals offered (over roughly a year timeframe) was 2.35.

As I said in my SEL post the gap between the number of SMBs on social media sites and the level of engagement (as shown in the Like/followers data) reflects the fact that most of these SMBs don’t know precisely what to do with social media once they arrive.