When people are looking to find local businesses, search is still king according to research from the Local Search Association (formerly the Yellow Pages Association).
Two things jumped out at me when looking at this chart. One is that the yellow page numbers seem incredibly high. Have 62% of people really used the yellow pages in the last month?
The second is how far down social media is on this list. Is social media really the 9th most used source to fine a local business today? Is social media really behind newspapers, directories, store circulars and internet yellow pages?
In the survey they asked about frequency of usage, which threw up some more “interesting” information. A majority of those ages 18 to 34 preferred search, as did a plurality of respondents ages 35 to 54. Among older users, yellow pages, and even print yellow pages alone, beat out search engines like Google.
So I expected that the use of yellow pages would skew higher amongst an older demographic. That makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is that for people between the age of 18-24 that they are more than twice as likely to use the yellow pages than a social network to find a local business. Really?
That if you combine yellow pages, internet yellow pages and print yellow pages, that 18-24 year-olds are more than 4x likely to use those sources than Facebook.Twitter to find a local business. Really?
Am I the only one astonished by these numbers?
No, it’s not surprising at all. Social networks are not efficient for finding answers. They are efficient for socializing. The sooner marketers realize this, the sooner we can give the kiddies sandbox back to the kids.
Just my two cents…