Small Biz Use Of Twitter Doubled In Five Quarters

More and more, small business owners are getting into the habit of promoting their companies 140 characters at a time.  A new report indicates that the number of small business owners who use Twitter doubled (and then some) between the third quarter of 2009 and fourth quarter of 2010.

That’s impressive by most standards.  Twitter’s still pretty young, so for it to achieve that sort of adoption rate isn’t exactly an unexciting thing.

In fairness to other approaches to marketing, though, Twitter is far from dominant.  Data from BIA/Kelsey and ConStat (which eMarketer made more widely available) shows that, even as Twitter usage among small business owners increased from 9 percent to 19 percent, usage of printed yellow pages still comes in at 29 percent.

eMarketer also explained, "Twitter was still behind many other social media tactics, with nearly half (48%) of respondents using Facebook for marketing and a quarter using some other social network."

So small business owners shouldn’t feel they’ve entirely missed the boat in the event they haven’t yet started using Twitter.

They also – and this is just one stray idea – might not want to feel using Twitter’s a complete necessity, since plenty of businesses are getting along fine without it.