Sensis e-Business Report 2011 –The Online Experience of Small and Medium Enterprises

Australian Digital and Social Media Stats 2011

There aren’t very many places on the Internet where you can get reliable data for Australian businesses’ use of digital marketing strategies except for Sensis annual reports including Sensis Social Media Report (May 2011) and Sensis e-Business Report “The Online Experience of Small and Medium Enterprises” (October 2011).

This special report examines a selection of Australian small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and their attitudes towards, and experiences with, e-business and social media. Research with 1,800 SMEs was undertaken across a range of online technologies, including the internet and email. Results in this report also include data on Australian consumers, which was collected concurrently through a consumer survey of 1,000 consumers. (quote from Sensis)
Here are the highlights relating to social media and digital marketing that affect Australian small and medium sized enterprises. The purpose of stating this statistics is to encourage small and medium sized businesses in Australia to re-think their attitude to digital marketing with their website and with their social media presence:-

About the Australian Consumer Digital and Social Media Usage:-

• 80% of Australians online used Internet to research products or services
• 64%of Australians purchased online in previous 12 months spending an average of $2,900 with 88% of online purchases were by users aged in their 30s and 74% by males
• 59% of Australians online used Internet to access social networks with 42% accessing social networks more than once per day
• Use of social networks by Australians aged in their 30s increased by 15% in 12 months
• 44% of Australians online used Internet to read blogs
• 12% of Australians have iPad or tablet device
• 92% of Australians have a mobile phone with 50% having Internet access
• Users of internet capable mobile phones aged in their 30s increased by 19%
• 67% of Australians with Internet capable mobile phones used it to research products and services

About the Australian Small and Medium Sized Enterprise (SME) Digital and Social Media Usage:-

• 95% of SMEs have access to the Internet
• 67% of SMEs have a website
• 68% of SMEs with a website reported improved effectiveness of their business mainly from received business enquiries and more exposure to the market
• 18% of SMEs connected to the Internet joined social networks for their business (increased from 10% 12 months ago) with the most common platform being Facebook at 89%
• 51% of SMEs that used social media reported that it had a positive impact on their business citing increased networking opportunities; good advertising and good customer feedback.
• 48% of SMEs that used social media reported no effect to business
• 1% of SMEs that used social media reported negative effect to business
• 26% of SMEs that used social media did so on a daily basis
• 25% of SMEs that used social media updated once a week
• 5% of SMEs that used social media never updated
• 11% of SMEs that used social media updated a few times a year
• 59% of SMEs with a website took orders online with 60% of those selling mainly to customers in the same city or town and 27% selling to overseas customers
• Only 16% of SMEs with an Internet presence had a digital strategy of which 54% included a mobile component and 53% included a social media component
• 88% of SMEs research products and services online
• 77% of SMEs placed orders online for products and services
• 58% of SMEs reported they had recovered their investment in e-commerce with a further 12% expecting to recover investment in next 12 months

Is Your Business Missing Out On Business Without An Adequate Digital and Social Media Presence?
If you don’t know where to start, contact [email protected] for an evaluation of your current digital and social media marketing strategies.

This information has been taken from the Sensis e-Business Report “The Online Experience of Small and Medium Enterprises” (October 2011). To view the full report visit http://about.sensis.com.au/small-business/sensis-ebusiness-report/

1. Anchor Text Importance

When you are getting incoming links to your blog, vary the anchor text of the links. The search engines use the anchor text to display you in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). You can rank highly for multiple terms if you have varying anchor text links from external websites.

2. Deep Links though-out your Blog

Make sure you have a Deep Link Strategy in place on your blog. When writing new posts, link to old posts and category pages. This will hopefully flag these pages of higher importance to the search engines and get your content ranked higher in the SERPs. There are many WordPress plugins that can help with a Deep Linking strategy.

3. Create a mix of NoFollow and Do Follow Links

You want to boost the Page Rank of your homepage as much as possible. A higher page rank means the search engines (mainly Google) will give your site higher importance and quicker indexing.
Any external links you create will pass off some of your Page Rank. In these situations use the NoFollow tag on external links. With internal links it is good to have Do Follow links so the search engines can easily spider your website.

4. Concentrate on Quality Links

Link Directories and Article sites are basically worthless now. Search Engines no longer value the links on these sites and as such you should keep away.
Concentrate on getting quality high PageRank links and understand that you want DoFollow links – getting NoFollow links will not help your SEO strategy at all.

5. Don’t participate in Link Exchanges

There is no point passing off PageRank links to someone, if they are just passing it back to you. The more outgoing links you have the more PageRank value you are passing off and the Search Engines will see this. Link Exchanges no longer have any beneficial impact so concentrate on securing quality one way links.

6. Link Building is a Long Term strategy

Think of this exercise as a medium-long term task. If you can make Link Building part of a weekly exercise the results will show in due course.
There is no overnight success with Link Building, so it’s important you look at the bigger picture and understand that every quality incoming link is strengthening your site in the long run.

You can check your website’s in-bound links at http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

The big question is what is social media’s role in the healthcare environment.

Most healthcare institutions do not allow access to social media for employees, due to security/privacy issues and concerns regarding employee productivity.

Safeguards about these privacy issues and restrictions regarding confidentiality have possibly brought about many healthcare facilities feeling that social media does not have the potential to directly impact patient care, their primary objective, and is therefore just a promotional tool.

However social media’s role in healthcare is ever increasing. More and more institutions have dedicated staff maintaining their social media marketing strategies and yet taboo it from the workplace. This is consolidated as social media has certainly gathered momentum with its reputation as biting you on the bum, however as an instrument to promote and inform, its value is priceless.

Frost & Sullivan’s survey showed that patients and other stakeholders have had access to online resources for some time – National Breast Cancer Foundation, Beyond Blue, information and support for all childhood conditions etc. and that social media is simply another available communication tool for all.

Social media’s role in healthcare can be as simple as patient support groups, communities of interest such as a Facebook page to discuss children’s different conditions eg Autism Speaks, to collaborative research using wikis, to marketing and customer feedback.

There is a huge untapped source with volumes of information and support to families, clinicians and healthcare institutions. Healthcare institutions are seeing the benefit for social media as the potential for its positive impact is just too significant to disregard. Most institutions are looking at developing guidelines for social media use and implementation as social networking in the workplace will become a common occurrence. The role of social media in healthcare will soon become an essential part of patient/client care with easy referrals to sites for information and support for all.Healthcare and social media

Enjoy Kaz :)