Ninety percent of those surveyed agreed that social media is important to their business. The report reveals that the self-employed (67%) and small business owners (66%) were more likely to strongly agree with this statement.

88% of all marketers found social media helps get them increased exposure. Additionally, 72% of those surveyed saw increased traffic and subscriptions as a result of social media.

Small business owners were more likely than all other groups (89.2% reporting benefits) to see increased exposure.

“connecting to other people I know or could meet” was the primary reason for using a geolocation service. 41% of the people chose that answer with the next highest (21%) going with “Finding a place liked by people I trust.” Getting discounts and winning virtual prizes rated very low on the scale.

the biggest reason they aren’t using them — privacy concerns.

Of those surveyed, nearly half of the respondents said they use Facebook Places.

For many educational tasks it is simply easier for you to show someone how to do something rather than to write it all down, edit it, and illustrate it in a written format.

simply take the top 5 or 10 most frequently asked questions in your business and start there.

make a video to enhance your current customer experience and they will bring you new customers. Moreover, the tone of the content will not be “salesy”, because you already sold them.

How is TastiRewards, the company’s loyalty program that also rewards a user’s social networking participation with Tasti D-Lite, going?

Our customers love it. They like [that we're] making it simpler for them to send out messages, whether it’s Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook — to save them a step of having to check in on their smartphones. We’re hearing from them that they love doing it and also that they like getting the extra points, because they’re earning their free Tasti faster [as a result of using the social tie-ins].We’re hearing great things from our franchisees. They’re seeing the benefits of the TastiRewards program. They’re talking and tweeting about it and sharing information. It’s made us more of an “it” brand, where people want to be tweeting out to their friends or posting messages on their Facebook walls.We’ve gotten phenomenal exposure for the brand. We have literally millions of impressions of eyeballs that have seen tweets and messages through Facebook and Foursquare, that are getting exposed because their friends have connected their social accounts to TastiRewards.

What we’re seeing and hearing most is that people are using them for the nutritional information. You can pull up nutritional panels for all of our flavors. That’s been one of the most popular elements of the TastiPad.

Social Engagement: By far, the most important motivation for consumers is the social component of location. 41% said the reason they checked in was to “connect with people I know or could meet” and another 21% said they were trying to “find a place liked by people they trust.”

According to a new report from ForeSee Results, fewer than 1% of website visits came directly from a social media URL. Their report also says that 18% of site visitors reported being influenced by social media, which would mean that 17% of those folks visited the site in some way other than clicking on a social media link.

ForeSee’s initial results, after surveying nearly 300,000 consumers, is that people who were influenced by social media spend more and are more satisfied and loyal customers than those who aren’t influenced by social media.

over 90 percent of college faculty use social media in the workplace, while other industries are 47 percent of employees use social media. In the classroom, 80 percent of respondents report using social media for some aspect of their course. Of those, nearly two-thirds use social media within their class session, and 30 percent post content for students to view outside of class. Another interesting figure from the survey is that more than 40 percent of faculty say they require students to read or view social media as part of a course assignment, and 20 percent assign students to comment or post to social media sites.

#1: Martell Home Builders

Think outside the box, like Martell did by allowing their clients to see where their contractors were at all times while on the job and by giving access to photos of their homes being built.

#2: Zappos