Watch out Google and Adobe: Small business is warming to social media

Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media are catching up to traditional websites as a marketing mechanism for small businesses. That's the takeaway from a just released survey of 2,000 small businesses by research firm Internet2Go. That could be bad for Google (GOOG), which has a virtual monopoly on small-business online advertising, and for Adobe (ADBE), which has a real monopoly on software tools used to build websites.

According to the survey, which ran in mid-September 2009, 45 percent of small-business owners have Twitter or Facebook accounts. That's astonishing considering that today only 44 percent of all small businesses have websites, according to some surveys. Remember, the Internet is over a decade old, but social media is really only two to three years old, if that."We've known anecdotally that small businesses are using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, but these numbers are surprising," says Greg Sterling, an Internet2Go senior analyst.