New research from MerchantCircle shows that local businesses are using social media sites - namely Facebook - to fuel their local online campaigns. Facebook has now surpassed Google (66%) as the most widely used marketing method amongst local merchants, and is almost tied with Google search (40%) as one of their top three most effective marketing methods, with 37% rating Facebook as one of their most effective tools.

Hyper Small?

A new report from Borrell Associates cast doubts on how effective some of these campaigns may actually be, their simplicity notwithstanding. That is because small businesses tend to seek out local audiences with local or hyper local campaigns. But Borrell finds local site traffic can be deceptive, with the unique visitor-to-actual-people ratio nearly 4 to 1. "Audiences are being overstated, and some of those visitors aren’t even local," it flatly says.

"Sales reps who know this information and come clean with advertisers about their traffic details are likely to gain their trust – and a leg up on the competition still peddling the 'unique visitor' story," it concluded.