Your small business should reach out for new customers online – the Internet is, indeed, THE gathering place. In fact, some people even spend their time online more than off line.

Before you finally decide to do so, you need to understand how your target audiences spend their time online – this way, you can adopt which branding and marketing methods and tools to use to maximise the results.

Check out these some important stats derived from VisualEconomics.com’s How The World Spends Its Time Online:

• The average American spends over 2 hours a day online.
• What people are doing online: Social networking – 22 percent, viewing content – 42 percent, and other activities (including email, commerce, search) – 36 percent.
• 55 percent American adults spend their time online everyday; the majority includes send/read email (45%,) use search engine (40%,) and get news (30%.)

… and these (visual) stats from the same source to help you get a bigger, better picture of the trends:

Let’s dig deeper…

There are some interesting facts from the chart above that every small business owner should look further into:

1. The majority spend daily Internet activities on the conventionals: Write/read email, search things and read news.

If you think people are spending lots of time on social media and anything Web 2.0 everyday, think again: Only 15 percent are using social media on daily basis. Moreover, only 10% of them read a blog daily, while only 5% make a purchase online. Please note that the low percentage could be related to the ‘everyday’ criteria.

I think that those not-so-encouraging stats are, on contrary, encouraging. I am excited to know that there is huge room to grow and explore for blogs, e-commerce sites and social media sites; the glass is half full, indeed.

2. Email marketing and Search Engine Optimisation/link building are not dead!

In the other hand, it seems that delivering your small business branding and marketing messages via email (e.g. newsletters, email ads and such) and news sites (e.g. press releases, interviews and such) still pretty much effective as of today.

Moreover, getting your small business sites on top of search engine results pages is (still) very important, as people likes to spend their time on search engines – some proofs: Most popular brands, according to the chart above, is Google, MSN/Bing, Facebook, Yahoo – three are search engines, and one is semi-search engine (Facebook – study shows that more and more people search using Facebook, instead of the search engines.)

And, oh, where is Twitter, anyway? Not that popular as a brand, I guess?

3. Worldwide, more people spend their time on social networking sites.

Related to #1, it is probably safe to assume that a good portion of global Internet users are using social media sites more than the Americans do. 80 percent of Brazilian Internet users are on social media, followed by Italy (73 percent) and Spain (75 percent.) US is on the 5th place behind Japan.

Like I mentioned early on this article, despite probably not using social networking sites on daily basis, people are using a good 22 percent of their time on social media, worldwide – another proof that you should optimise your small business social media campaign more over time.

Geo-target your small business online marketing

Another thought on the worldwide social media figures: If your small business’ target market is global, you might want to focus your geo-targeting efforts on your social media marketing (e.g. geo-target your Facebook ads, etc.)

Any thoughts to share on the trends? Please share by commenting on this article :)

Ivan Widjaya
I spend 12 hours online everyday

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