Survey Finds Small Businesses Doubled Their Twitter Usage in 2010

In honor of its fifth birthday, Twitter has just released an astonishing set of numbers chronicling the adoption of the microblogging service. It took Twitter 3 years, 2 months and 1 day to get from its first Tweet to its billionth, and the company now sees an average of 140 million Tweets per day.

It should be no surprise then that Twitter’s increasing popularity has led to expanded efforts by small businesses to use Twitter as part of their local marketing efforts. According to a recent report from BIA/Kelsey and ConStat, Twitter usage by small businesses more than doubled between the third quarter of 2009 and the end of 2010. Usage of traditional print yellow pages, the survey points out, remains unchanged.

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Now, nearly one in five small businesses use Twitter. That’s still behind other social media marketing efforts. 48% of respondents say they use Facebook, for example.

The increasing Twitter usage by small businesses accompanies other online efforts. More than a third of respondents say they’ve increased their usage of social media and online advertising over the past year, and almost 50% say they plan to increase this further in the next year.

The survey also found that younger businesses were most active in social media and least active in traditional media. Businesses less than seven years old were more likely to use Twitter, for example, and less likely to advertise in the Yellow Pages.

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