According to a new article published today by eMarketer, links to social networking sites may be rising quickly—appearing in 20% of marketing e-mails in July 2009, up from just 2% in February.

This dramatic increase is slightly dampened by the fact that the majority of leading online retailers have yet to jump into the mix. In fact, of the top 100 Internet Retailer sites, only about half of them promoted either their Twitter or Facebook profiles in their email messages, and less than 30% with these profiles displayed them prominently on their website.

As for everybody else, it seems that linking customers and prospective clients to any affiliated website is almost always a good thing—and it appears that these numbers will continue to grow for small to medium sized businesses.

The question begs, are these big brands helping or hindering their already well known brand-names by not entering these new social media realms while their smaller competitors are? Tell us what you think in the comments section below.

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