Survey finds 50 percent rise in small business Facebook usage
London, 8 February 2012 – Major survey of UK small businesses finds dramatic rise in use of Facebook for business purposes over past year.
A major annual survey of 1300 small businesses – the PeoplePerHour.com Small Business Survey 2012 – has revealed that the vast majority of the UK’s 4.5 million small businesses are actively using social media to recruit new staff, find work and market themselves.
91 percent of respondents used social networks for business purposes – up from the 60 percent recorded in last year’s survey. Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter were cited as by far the most used social media sites, with Facebook the most popular.
The findings backup a recent Deloitte report commissioned by Facebook that claimed that the social networking website benefits the UK economy to the tune of more than £2bn a year.
According to Facebook’s Chief Operating Office Sheryl Sandberg the report “shows that Facebook is about a lot more than sharing pictures or keeping up with friends. Increasingly, social media means growth and jobs. Social media is proving particularly valuable for small- and medium-sized businesses, which form the backbone of the European economy.”
According to PeoplePerHour.com Founder & CEO Xenios Thrasyvoulou the growing usage of Facebook by small businesses opens huge revenue generating potential for the platform, which is great news for the company ahead of its planned IPO.
“Those analysts questioning the predicted $100 billion valuation of Facebook should take note of the fact that Facebook is much more than just a social network,” he says.
“There’s a perception that Facebook is almost exclusively used for personal relationships, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. As our survey findings demonstrate, Facebook is an increasingly crucial technology for businesses as well.”
PeoplePerHour.com (http://www.peopleperhour.com) launched in 2007, with the simple idea of connecting small businesses with talented, independent service providers, in an environment that fosters accountability and trust.
The site initially began with one sector – administrative services – and following its success and popularity quickly expanded within three months alone to 10 service categories covering thousands of individual skills.
The website now has in excess of 183,000 service providers, across 150 countries, and serves over 63,000 small businesses clients.
88 percent of the work completed on PeoplePerHour.com gets a five-star rating by the client, validating the fundamental belief on which the business was founded: that talented professionals, when working for themselves, have both a cost advantage but are also more motivated, productive and accountable to the quality of their work, delivering better value to the client all round.
