Nearly three-fourths of respondents to a recent Merchant Circle survey say that they utilize various social media platforms as marketing strategies for small business ventures. This is a large jump from 50 percent in 2011, indicating that it is becoming more important to promote a company online.

Twitter's popularity with small business owners is on the rise, with 40 percent of companies using the website, up from 32 percent in 2009. This may be because, according to a recent study, 2.6 million, or 66 percent, of social media interactions occur on Twitter, which is more than Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+, reports Business 2 Community.

While participation in social media advertising can be time-consuming for developing businesses, there are various tools that can schedule automatic tweets from businesses.

Twitter is an easy way to expose a large potential customer base to the latest products and services a business has to offer. According to MSNBC, Twitter will have 500 million users by the end of February, with approximately 13 new accounts registered every second.