Forty-three (43) percent of U.S. businesses are using social networking to win new customers, according to research from Regus.

This figure is eight percentage points higher than last year’s result and Regus’ research also reveals that:

Social media advertising revenues will soar from $2.1 billion in 2010 to $8.3 billion in 2015, growing by a compounded 31.6 percent per annum, according to BIA/Kelsey.

BIA/Kelsey, which defines social media advertising as advertising on social networks, reckons display advertising alone will grow from $2.1 billion in 2010 to $7.7 billion in 2015 (CAGR: 30.4 percent).

Are you liable if your Facebook fans, Twitter followers or others post flattering but misleading testimonials about your products or services on social networking sites? The answer is ‘yes’ for at least one Internet marketing firm – Australian company, Allergy Pathway Pty Ltd.

The Australian Federal Court recently ordered Allergy Pathway Pty Ltd (formerly ‘Advanced Allergy Elimination’) and its director, Paul Keir, to each pay AUD $7,500 in fines for allowing false, misleading and deceptive testimonials about the company’s allergy treatments to stay on its website and on third party websites, including Facebook.

Social media generates less than 1 percent of traffic for the average website, according to research by ForeSee Results.

According to ForeSee’s research, social media websites are not directly responsible for much website traffic, but still play an influential role.

If you’re not getting at least a 95 percent return on investment (ROI) from your social marketing efforts, you’re in the minority.

According to the MarketingSherpa 2011 Social Marketing Benchmark Report, 54 percent of the 3,342 Internet marketers MarketingSherpa surveyed estimated their ROI to be 100 percent or higher, with the average quoted as 95 percent.

According to eMarketer, the number of people who really use Twitter is a fraction of the number typically reported by Twitter and the media.

Due to duplicate accounts, Twitter users quitting, Twitter users who read Tweets but don’t really participate, and other reasons, eMarketer says the number of people who actually use Twitter is in the tens of millions… not in the hundreds of millions as suggested by the number of Twitter accounts (175 million in September 2010) and the visitors to Twitter.com (estimated to be 20-30 million per month).

U.S. small businesses increasingly view the Internet as crucial to their businesses and are spending more money and time on websites, social media and search engine optimization (SEO).

Over half of small businesses (56 percent) now have websites (up from just 46 percent a year ago), almost a third (31 percent) use social media (up from 24 percent last year), and over a quarter (27 percent) have a search engine optimization (SEO) plan in place (up from 19 percent).

Google has just launched ‘+1′. Google +1 is a button that will appear alongside Google’s search results, Google Adwords ads and other web content which people can click on to recommend to their Google contacts, much in the same way as people use Facebook’s ‘Like’ button.

You need to have, and be logged into, a Google account to use Google +1 to recommend and share content. Also, when you first click the +1 button you can choose whether or not to let Google use that behavioral information to personalize ads and other content.

Social media influences buying decisions. That’s the upshot of recent research by Wantlet, Inc. Wantlet surveyed 700 people and found that 75 percent would read an advertisement or visit a product web page if a friend or family member made an online recommendation to so do.

Indeed, over 82 percent of those surveyed said they sought social input when looking for deals and product comparisons.

Seven out of 10 U.S. consumers (76 percent) admit to typing fake information into online registration forms.

Given that 6 out of 10 (66 percent) also believe sites should offer ‘social sign-in’ functionality, the incidence of fake registrations may be reason enough to let people sign up to your site using a Facebook, Twitter or other social network account.