I have an important announcement to make, so pay attention, everyone.

Social media can help your business get exposure to more potential customers.

Now pick your jaw up off the floor, push your eyeballs back into your head, and go get you some share buttons.

Yeah, no one is rearranging their face right now.  As a business owner, you are probably aware by now that social media is a critical tool to getting your business noticed and talked about.  But do you know just how much social media is helping your company?  One SEO platform, BrightEdge, asked just that and came up with startling results: websites that use share buttons get significantly more traffic than those that don’t.  When it came to Twitter alone, sites that use the Twitter share button get seven times the amount of exposure that sites that don’t use the Twitter button get.

BrightEdge found this by analyzing a random sample of some four million tweets with its new Social Share Engine, cloud-based analytics technology that can track how users share and interact with social share buttons and links.  Of the four million tweets analyzed, BrightEdge was able to discern which tweets contained shared information and whether it was shared with sharing buttons, links, or other methods.

The company found that sites that integrate the Twitter share button get an average of 27 mentions, compared to just four mentions among sites that don’t use the Twitter share button.

The report didn’t analyze the Facebook Like or Share button, but it did note that more websites have integrated Facebook share buttons than the Twitter share button: 50.3% compared to 42.5%, respectively. 

Interestingly, while Google+ has only been around for a few weeks, some 8% of websites have integrated the +1 button, while some 4% have integrated the LinkedIn share button.

Even more interesting: nearly half of the 10,000 largest websites still have not integrated any social sharing buttons, but that number is shrinking.  Of the largest 10,000 sites on the Web, 53.6% display social sharing buttons, up from 52.8% in July.

The fact that social media can drive eyeballs to your website is not a huge shocker.  In the business world, large and small companies alike have known that social media is a highly cost-effective tool for getting exposure.  In a recent survey by social marketing company Roost, the majority of small and local business owners said they prefer social media to most other marketing tools, including search engine marketing.