According to the Merchant Circle’s survey “Merchant Confidence Index (MCI) for Q2 2011”, majority of the US SMBs are more likely to invest on
Social media, especially Facebook rather than digital media marketing and traditional media marketing. According to the survey, social networking usage by US SMBs is increasing day by day. SMBs are investing more on Facebook than other traditional media like TV, Print media and even email marketing.
About 66% of small businesses (respondents in the survey) were cited they had used Facebook marketing, but only 22% have used Facebook ads gain more visibility on the network and drive traffic to their page and website. Also two-third (66.5%) of businesses that used Facebook ads would do so again mainly because the campaign set up and management is relatively easy. The reasons behind repeat usage is effective tool for adopting new customers (49.3%), Pause campaigns ability (64.8%), and precision targeting (53.7%).
The survey reported that only 9.4% were interested in offering daily deals while more than half of the small businesses cited familiarity with the big daily deal platforms. Interestingly, majority of the businesses would choose to run Facebook Deals or Google Offers instead of running deals through Group on, Living Social or other deals providers.