Don’t think it’s time for your business to go social? You must be joking, right?

Social to me is the culmination of personal thoughts and ideas brought together through the desire of shared interaction and friendship.

It seems like no matter who you are talking with nowadays, someone is asking if you are on Facebook or Twitter. Who needs business cards right? How many times have you told a new acquaintance you just met to just find you on Facebook or that you would “hit them up” on Facebook?

Society is changing and along with it comes how we interact with one another. We are making connections with others who in the past we would not normally connect to (i.e. friends of friends on Facebook).

According to the Nielson Co,

“The number of Internet users who visited a social network or a blog increased by 24 percent from April 2009 to April 2010, while the average person spent 66 percent more time on those sites during that period”

“About 75 percent of all Internet users visited a social network or blog in April 2010, and they spent 22 percent of their online time – more than 110 billion minutes”

“That’s more than twice the number of minutes Nielsen recorded a year earlier. The average person spent 5 hours, 51 minutes on these sites in April, compared to 3 hours, 31 minutes per person during the previous April”

Consumers are online and they want to connect every single day. Ensuring you are there to connect with them must be a priority your business puts into play. Check out these other statistics:

According to the same study,

“Facebook is the main driver of this trend. Since early 2009, [Facebook] has increased membership from fewer than 200 million to nearly 500 million”

“Facebook was the third most popular online brand, with 54 percent of all Internet users visiting the site. Google, which reached 82 percent of online users, was still first…but while the average user spent 1 hour, 21 minutes on Google during April, Facebook users were logged on an average of 6 hours.”

According to another marketing company Razorfish,

“40% of respondents “friended” brands on Facebook, while 25% reporting following brands on Twitter.”

And as you can see on the below chart, 43.5% of the respondents that “friended” a brand on Twitter did it to get access to exclusive deals or offers.

With the rapid growth of Facebook and Twitter and the audience that these sites bring in, it is essential that you are finding the time to market your company in these mediums. You are missing a huge opportunity to utilize social media to effectively grow your business with time being the only variable needed from you.

These free social mediums have definitive ROI for you and your business. If you spend more time with social media you will only see an increase in traffic, brand recognition, fans, friends, and the most important part – sales.

Good luck and don’t forget to have fun!

Addoway helps online merchants utilize social commerce to grow their online business, while providing shoppers with great deals from people they trust. Addoway accomplishes this by providing merchants with a unique web store builder and social marketplace where shoppers can utilize their social graph to identify trustworthy merchants to buy from.