Yahoo Looks At Why People Start A Small Business

New year brings more small business interest

Traditionally Yahoo! Small Business sees an uptick in people starting their own online business in the first quarter of the New Year. As 2011 kicks off, Yahoo! Small Business explores the New Year’s surge and the reasons and barriers to starting a new business.

A new survey, conducted by Yahoo! Small Business and Ipsos OTX MediaCT, reveals one in two have either dreamed of starting their own business or have actually started a business.

Key findings from the survey include:

*Twice as many small business owners than non-business owners say they are doing their dream job.

*79 percent say the best thing about owning their own business is a flexible work schedule.

*61 percent of non-business owners say they want to start a business so they can earn a living while fueling personal passions.

Evidence that Americans look to start the New Year by creating their own business can be found by looking at online search trends. In January 2011, Yahoo! Search saw a dramatic increase in searches on planning, funding and starting a business. Yahoo! Search data includes:

*Searches for “how to write a business plan” are up 746% on Yahoo!

*Searches for “starting a business” are up 451%

*Searches for “government small business loans” on Yahoo! are up 303% and “small business loans” up 145%

*Searches for “business ideas” are up 135%

Twitter Gives 3 Huge Reasons for Businesses to Use Twitter

19 Billion Searches Per Month, 105 Million Users, 100,000 Apps

If you truly feel that not using Twitter for your business is the way to go, then don’t use it. However, Twitter dropped some pretty interesting statistics at its Developer Conference, which may perk your ears up, if not make you reconsider your position.

1. Twitter Gets 19 billion Searches Per Month.

Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan spoke with Twitter CEO Evan Williams who says Twitter gets about 19 billion searches per month. If you compare that with comScore estimates for the major search engines (as Sullivan did here, along with all the caveats that come with that), that puts Twitter in 2nd place, just behind Google – ahead of Yahoo and Bing.

Where Twitter ranks in searches compared to the search engines really isn’t the point. The point is that people are using Twitter and Twitter apps A LOT to find information. I think you can see where this could be useful to know from a business standpoint. By the way, Twitter also just announced a little thing called “Promoted Tweets” – ads that will initially show up for Twitter searches.

2. Twitter has over 105 million users.

Last week, Matthew Daines, the lead developer of our own Twellow did some math and suggested that Twitter had probably surpassed 100 million users. It turns out he was right, because Williams said at the conference that Twitter actually has over 105 million, and adds about 300,000 a day. Once again, I think you can see why this might be of interest.

3. There are over 100 thousand registered Apps

There are so many Twitter apps out there that are making Twitter usable and more efficient to people. There are apps that shape Twitter around a person’s specific needs. This no doubt plays a huge role in Twitter’s growth, which will continue. It also means there are a lot of ways you can use Twitter yourself as a business.

At WebProNews, we recently revisited a Twitter app directory called OneForty. Now this directory has only a fraction of that 100,000 apps listed, but there are nearly 2,700, and that’s still plenty. They are broken down into categories like advertising, analytics, business, email, mobile, monitoring, networking, shopping, etc. There is no question you will be able to find some useful apps there or in another Twitter app directory.

Chris Crum

By Chris Crum – Mon, 02/15/2010 – 3:59pm.

Some Things About Facebook to Consider

According to data from Compete, Facebook has surpassed Google as the top source of traffic for major portals like Yahoo, MSN, and AOL. In December, 15% of traffic to these sites came from Facebook and MySpace. 13% from just Facebook. They say it’s among the top traffic drivers for other types of sites as well.

In a recent WebProNews article, I asked if it is becoming increasingly less critical for businesses to have websites, when they can just have things like Facebook pages and Google Place pages. The discussion is more complex than just that (feel free top participate here), but the general point is that you can have a strong web presence without having an actual web site (although I still recommend having one in most cases).

By Facebook’s most recent stat counts, the site has over 400 million active users. Half of them log on each day. Over 35 million upate their status each day, with over 60 million status updates posted each day. Over 5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) are shared each week, over 3.5 million events are created each month, and there are over 3 million active Pages on Facebook.

Over 1.5 million local businesses have active pages. Over 20 million people become fans of Pages each day, and Pages have created over 5.3 billion fans. The average user has 130 friends. These last few stats say a lot about the power of Facebook for businesses.

Facebook pages can be found in Google (often near the top of results pages), and there are things you can do to make them more powerful. I discussed this in more detail here. Basically, it comes down to participation, integration with other online presences, not being annoying to your fans, and hosting events (which can also lead to participation).

Promotion of your page is key as well. Use prominent links on your site(s), use the Facebook Fan Box or something like it. You can promote it in your author bio on articles/blogs, in email newsletters, on other social media profiles, in your Google profile, on your business card, in your signage, in your email signature, and in your ads, to name a few.