Small Firms Say LinkedIn Works, Twitter Doesn’t —Wall Street Journal Plus: YouTube Starts Charging

Six Out of 10 Small-Business Owners Buy Business Benefits of Social Media; 41% Prefer LinkedIn; Only 3% Vouch for Twitter 

Not that that stopped Twitter from getting a $9B valuation this last week.   Emily Maltby and Shira Ovide report that the Wall Street Journal and Vistage International recently surveyed 835 small business owners.  Here are the results.

Professional-networking service  LinkedIn Corp. topped the survey, with 41% of respondents singling it out as potentially beneficial to their company. Sixteen percent picked YouTube, the video service owned by Google Inc., and 14% chose social network Facebook Inc.

The findings illustrate the challenges facing Twitter in demonstrating to small-business owners the benefits of using the short-messaging service to reach customers. Twitter says it is just beginning to court small businesses, which make up the bulk of U.S. companies, and are an important revenue source for many tech giants, including Google.

. . . “We will tweet 10-plus times a day, and we will put roughly the same number of posts on LinkedIn per day, yet we get dramatically different results,” says Mr. Lopez, whose A2L Consulting offers services to law firms.

Find out more about the results of the WSJ/Vistage survey in the full story here. 

Ad Age reports that YouTube is set to introduce paid subscriptions this spring. 

A Recent Wall Street Journal / Vistage Survey Ranked the Usefulness of Social Media Tools for Small Business Owners 

see also:

• Twitter Is Said to Be Worth $9 Billion as BlackRock Buys Shares  —Bloomberg [1/30]
• Why I Hate Twitter  —The Week [1/30]   [Opinion by Matt K. Lewis]
• Why I Love Twitter  —The Week    [1/31]  [Opinion by Paul Brandus]
• YouTube Set to Introduce Paid Subscriptions This Spring   —Ad Age  [1/29]
• In Sports or Business, Always Prepare for the Next Day    —New York Times [ 11/10/2012]  [Interview with Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn]
• Twitter Unlinks from LinkedIn —Forbes [7/29/2012]   
• Twitter Ends Relationship with LinkedIn  —Inc.com  [7/2/2012]   
• Twitter Cuts off Service to LinkedIn, API Changes Draw Ire  —CBSNews.com  [7/2/2012]
• 16 Smarter Ways to Use LinkedIn to Build Your Business   —CopyBlogger Blog
• Ten Ways for Small Businesses to Use Linked In  —LinkedIn Blog
• Kevin Knebl Video on LinkedIn for Sales Professionals   —see KevinKnebl.com

 

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