How Much Time, Money Do Small Businesses Spend on Social Media? [Infographic]

We just wrapped up a survey asking almost 500 of our small business customers how much time and money they spend on social media (if you participated, thank you!). We asked how many hours small business owners or employees dedicate to various social media activities, from finding and sharing content to blogging, we wanted to know what tasks take the most time, and what platforms small businesses are most active on. We also inquired about marketing and social media budgets, and how much money is spent on tools to manage and analyze social media efforts.

After crunching a lot of numbers and staring at dozens of pie charts, the survey results suggest the following...

Small businesses:

• Spend more time on social media, but many struggle with the added workload.
   
• Focus on Facebook and Twitter, while adoption of Pinterest and Google+ remains slow.
   
• Realize the value of content – but, again, time is an issue.
   
• Find value in paying for social media tools.

Here's a fun and informative infographic that we created (as seen on Forbes, PR Daily, VentureBeat, Technorati and more) illustrating some of the key data that led to these four conclusions:

 

Want to share this infographic on your own blog or website? Simply copy and paste this embed code:

<a href="http://www.verticalresponse.com"><img src="http://www.verticalresponse.com/sites/www.verticalresponse.com/files/how_much_do_small_businesses_spend_on_social_media.png" height="3250" width="600"/></a>

 

UPDATE 10/31/2012: Here's our press release with more details!

 

Posted by Connie Sung Moyle

Connie Sung Moyle is the Public Relations Manager at VerticalResponse. Connect with her on Twitter at @sungmoyle.

Comments

[Lilia Tovbin]

Nice infographic and post, thank you! Your survey results are very much inline with my experience - I spend most of my energy on Facebook and original content creation in hopes of building a loyal fan base. I like results from promoting my Facebook posts so far but it's not easy to measure ROI, especially because I believe the value is more long term and can not yet be measured easily.