Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are embracing social media to source new business and stay in touch with existing customers, according to a survey conducted by Really Simple Systems.
The survey covered 862 respondents — the majority from SMEs with less than 50 employees. It found that 62% of the respondents now use social networking in everyday business.
The research showed that 92% of those using it do so to keep in touch with existing customers, while 78% are using it to find new customers.
LinkedIn is the most widely-used social media tool by small businesses, with 83% using the business-orientated social networking site.
Facebook (72% of respondents) is the next most popular means of conducting "social business", followed closely by Twitter (65%).
45% of these socially active small businesses also run a company blog to engage with the public, but only 3.5% reported to be using MySpace, and a handful of others are using other forms of social media such as YouTube, Yammer, Xing, Quora and FourSquare.
The survey highlighted that the use of cloud CRM by small businesses has now overtaken in-house CRM, with 45% of respondents now using hosted applications as opposed to 36% using in-house CRM.
The survey confirms that CRM systems remain popular type of Cloud-based offering used by small businesses and 66% of respondents reported that they are now more confident in hosted CRM systems than traditional in-house systems.
The use of hosted accounting, ERP, payroll and manufacturing offerings has gone up slightly (between one and three percent), while one percent less companies are using a hosted HR system. Despite only a modest rise in their use, confidence in hosted systems over their in-house counterparts has risen in most areas, most notably in the payroll market, with some 54% or respondents now more confident in hosted offerings, up 10% on last year.
The survey also revealed that 40% of those questioned plan to spend more on IT in the next 12 months than they did in the last 12 months and a further 38% will keep IT spend at the same level.
The survey questioned small business owners, directors, sales, marketing and IT managers, on their views of cloud services and the reliability of the products currently available in the market and covered social media.
