A recent study conducted by Zoomerang and GrowBiz Media predicted that small businesses will continue to steadily sustain, and potentially increase their marketing budgets in the coming year, particularly the portion dedicated to online marketing. This year, 39% of small businesses involved in the study spent 20% of their annual budgets on websites with that number projected to increase another 17% in 2011 – the largest increase of any marketing tactic in the survey. Over half of respondents stated that their company currently has a website, which most use primarily for general information and customer service.

Not so surprisingly, social media marketing was predicted to follow as the third-highest increase in online spending next year, considering that 34% of the companies utilizing word-of-mouth marketing have some sort of social media presence online.

With the increase in spending online, many business owners feel it is important to see the metrics involved with their social campaigns similar to those available with websites. Facebook business pages come with “Insights,” charts and graphs illustrating interactions between users and your page but up until this point only third party programs have been available for analyzing Twitter data. Recently, however, Twitter announced that they would finally be offering an official analytics tool by the end of 2010. Users will be able to use Twitter Analytics to view graphs of followers, retweets, replies, and favorites over time – it will even provide information as specific as which tweets caused users to unfollow your account. The inarguable best part of the new tool is its price: Free.

So while interest, emphasis, and spending in the online realm continue to increase, Twitter offers some comfort to small businesses by providing a tool that won’t cause that annual spending to rise any more than necessary.