NEW YORK CITY - More small businesses prefer LinkedIn to Twitter, according to a new Wall Street Journal survey of business owners, that newspaper reports. Overall, six out of 10 small-business owners think social media is valuable to growing their companies. Only 3% pointed to Twitter as having the most potential to assist their business.

"On Twitter, you can't engage in a meaningful way," said Todd DeMann, founder of Freshology, a foodservice company in Los Angeles. Freshology uses Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and other social media sites to market its services. Facebook ranked number six in driving online traffic to the company website, while Twitter ranked far below at 117.

Small firms usually don??t have a lot of time or resources to devote to social media. Only four in 10 business owners have someone to handle social media specifically. Many owners track the success of such campaigns by page views, direct sales or click-throughs.

"We will tweet 10-plus times a day, and we will put roughly the same number of posts on LinkedIn per day, yet we get dramatically different results," said Ken Lopez with A2L Consulting. Most of the traffic increases have come from not Twitter, but other social media sites, including YouTube and Facebook. "LinkedIn is the dominant traffic driver," said Lopez. "Twitter is a small percentage by comparison."

Twitter has yet to fully engage small businesses, something the company plans to do more of in the future. "We're just at the start of both of these efforts" to reach small businesses, said Richard Alfonsi, vice president of global online sales for Twitter.