The majority of small and medium-sized enterprises in the UK are embracing social media as a means of conducting business.
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) vendor Really Simple Systems surveyed 862 business owners* and found 62% now use social networking in everyday business.
92% of those using it, do so to keep in touch with existing customers, whilst 78% are using it to find new customers.
LinkedIn is the most widely-used social media tool by small businesses, with 83% using it. Facebook (72% of respondents) is the next most popular means of conducting ‘social business’, followed closely by Twitter (65%). Forty-four percent 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 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 majority from small and medium-sized organisations with less than 50 employees