When it comes to social media usage by small and medium businesses (SMBs), Facebook is still King, with 45.0% of SMBs saying they use a Facebook page for advertising and promotion, according to Wave 20 of our Local Commerce Monitor™ survey of small businesses (Q3/2016). That puts a Facebook page as the most used media overall in the survey.

If you look at just the social media channels covered in the survey, Facebook ads and Facebook news feed ads are among the top five social media used by SMBs. But if Facebook is King, what does that make Twitter?

Out of the 13 different social media channels in the survey (including a catch-all “other social” category), Twitter placed 4th with a usage of 23.9%, which puts it behind Facebook page, Facebook ads, and LinkedIn. This 23.9% figure, however, does not include Promoted Tweets or Twitter video (a new channel added in Wave 20). If you combine usage of their various advertising products, than 63.4% of the SMBs surveyed use Facebook products, while 26.3% use Twitter products. This would place Twitter in 2nd place among the 13 social media channels, behind the combined Facebook products, and in 11th place out of the 60+ media channels in the LCM survey.

The small businesses using Twitter reported higher levels of extraordinary (20x+ spend) and excellent (10-19x spend) returns on investment for promoted tweets and Twitter video than for Twitter itself.

Twitter video is expected to see the biggest spend increase, with 37.7% of SMBs planning to increase spend. 35.4% of SMBs said they planned to increase spend on promoted tweets, while 27.7% plan to increase spend on Twitter.

When it comes to marketing to small businesses that use social media, including Twitter, here are a couple of things to keep in mind:

• Their use of social media is increasing and diversifying. Instead of one or two, many SMBs market through multiple social channels- native ads, video, etc.
• The marketing tool or service that SMBs were most interested in adding in the next 12 months was social media monitoring.
• SMBs want to carry their other marketing efforts across social media channels and be able to measure it.

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