According to Nielsen, 2.2 million adult consumers in Tampa Bay use social media every month, an audience that continues to expand. As a result of this growth, social media has become a crucial part of local advertising campaigns.

Social media allows Tampa Bay business owners to continually be in front of their target customers and to stay top-of-mind. It allows businesses to communicate daily and be the first company on call when needed. Social media has become essential for marketing local goods and services.

The best part is that social media is free to use for both Tampa Bay consumers and business owners.

There is no subscription service for social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram which, according to Nielsen, are used by 76.7% of Tampa Bay consumers each month. There are no monthly payments or premium memberships required to unlock more services.

Every month, 3.2 million adults in Tampa Bay use social media, according to Nielsen. Seventy-five percent of these consumers use Facebook, far more than other sites like Instagram (also owned by Facebook), Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

As a stand-alone medium, Facebook is used by more people in Tampa Bay than watch local TV stations. Only Tampa Bay radio and local cable reach more consumers.

The large audience commanded by social media has attracted a significant amount of advertising dollars from local advertisers. According to Borrell Associates, a company that measures advertising expenditures across the county, Tampa Bay area businesses are expected to spend $311 million on social media advertising, a 29.9% increase over 2022. The overwhelming majority of these dollars are being spent with Facebook.

Yesterday, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the company was changing its name to "Meta".  This change, though, only affects the name of the parent company. There will be no change to the company's brands like Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp.

How will this name change affect Tampa Bay businesses that advertise on Facebook?

Tampa area business owners are expected to invest $1.2-billion during 2021 to advertise to consumers connected to the internet. This forecast was produced by Borrell Associates, a company that tracks business advertising expenditures across the country.

These online marketing dollars will be spent on banner advertising, search engine marketing, email, as well as audio and video advertising. This is all to capture the attention of shoppers and buyers as they go about their connected days.

According to Nielsen, 95.2% of adult consumers in the Tampa area have access to the internet. They connect, primarily, with desktop and laptop computers; smartphones; or tablets.

Ninety-four percent of Tampa Bay adults spend at least one hour per week online, with most spending at least 10 hours connected.

How important is Twitter to Tampa area consumers? Yesterday, for instance, the social media platform was mentioned in at least ten articles published by the Tampa Bay Times yesterday.  Almost every local TV newscast included references to the site as well.

Twitter's outsized presence in the news, however, is enormously disproportional to the importance of the micro-blogging app in the life of Tampa's consumers.

According to Nielsen, only about 15% of adults in Tampa Bay use Twitter during the course of a month. This is minuscule compared to other social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook.

Twitter offers 20 different options that Tampa Bay small business owners can utilize to market their goods and services to local consumers.  The platform's minimal reach, however, can hamper the success of any advertising campaign.

Following the lead of many national marketers, some Tampa Bay small business owners are considering canceling or, at minimum, pausing their advertising schedules with social media network Facebook and its co-owned photo-sharing platform, Instagram.

According to the New York Times, "more than 400 companies, from Coca-Cola and Adidas to Ford and Lego, have vowed to halt advertising on the social network, in a growing protest over how it handles hate speech and other harmful content".

With the pandemic figured in, Tampa Bay small business owners were expected to spend $164million on Facebook and Instagram advertising in 2020. This is according to Borrell Associates, a firm that specializes in the collection and analysis of local marketing expenditures in every city across the United States. But these expenditures could shrink if the protests become louder.

Every type of Central Florida business imaginable, including clothing stores, plumbers, HVAC repair, funeral homes, restaurants, dentists, and nonprofits, has come to realize how powerfully social media can contribute to their bottom lines.

Part of what makes Facebook and Instagram attractive to small business owners is the enormous reach these platforms have among consumers. Locally, the audience size for these two social media sites now rival Tampa radio, TV, cable, and newspaper outlets.

For small business owners considering a hiatus from social media advertising, there is a viable way to redirect these dollars into a different medium without losing the marketing equity or momentum built-up on Facebook.

Every week, 2,193,604 adult consumers tune-in to a Tampa Radio station. That is way more than are reached by other media, including local television, newspaper, social media, or streaming audio sites like Pandora and Spotify.

There is a more significant number, though, for thousands of Tampa Bay small business owners who advertise on Tampa radio. The real question is how many of these listeners stick around when their commercials come on?

A 2011 Nielsen study discovered that, on average, 93% of listeners stayed with the radio station they were tuned-to when the commercials came on. That number amazed many advertisers at the time who believed that audiences were far more likely to defect when the music stopped.

A lot has changed since 2011. Tampa Bay consumers have many more media options and can instantly connect to each with a button-push, mouse-click, screen-tap, or voice command. With all this instant gratification, do radio audiences still stay tuned during commercial breaks?

Tampa Bay retailers spend a considerable amount of time and money marketing their small businesses on social media.  Is this effort paying off?

Each month, according to Nielsen, 1.6 million Tampa Bay adults use Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. This equates to 78% of consumers.  This reach is rather anemic compared to Tampa radio and TV, which attracts considerably more users in a single week than these social media platforms do over 30 days.

Among local millennials, the monthly reach of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter is eclipsed by the weekly reach of Tampa radio.

The number of consumers reached by an advertising campaign, according to Nielsen, is the media consideration that has the most significant effect on increasing sales. 

The first radio station in Tampa went on-the-air in 1922.  Eighty-two years later, Facebook inaugurated the social media era.  Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit, and hundreds of other sites quickly followed.

As social media matured from a novelty to part of consumers' daily rituals, some Tampa Bay business owners began to experiment with advertising.

By every key advertising metric, though, Tampa radio remains the best choice for a small business to market their goods and services. Here's why.