Some small business slow to social media

Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest have taken over small business marketing campaigns and made it a necessity to have one or all the social media sites incorporated in a marketing plan.

However, according to a new eMarketer report, just 24 percent of small businesses and 33 percent of medium-sized businesses have included social media in a structured way into their businesses. You might ask why companies have not taken advantage of the sites, considering social media site have billions of users, which could give more exposure to a small business.

According to research conducted by Constant Contact in May and released by eMarketer, small businesses were looking to keep their budgets the same in the new year, which kept many from fully implementing a social media strategy.

"Integration of social media within company processes is one of the latest trends, as larger companies work to incorporate social beyond marketing and into customer service, sales and research and development," the eMarketer report said. "Small and medium-size businesses are also working to do so, but still have a ways to go."

In addition to the 24 percent of small businesses that use social media in structured way, 20 percent use social media informally. Twenty-five percent said that they planned to use social media in a structured manner next year while 31 percent reported that have no plans to integrate social media in the next year.

According to a report from the International Telecommunication Union, Facebook is the world's largest social network by a long shot, getting close to the 1 billion active users mark, but adding Twitter and LinkedIn users places the number of social media users over 1 billion worldwide. The study showed that most of the users check their social media pages on their mobile phones.