Small businesses in IT may be seeing the benefits in the investment of time and money into IT support from social networking, yet many are wary of the concept, it is said.

Siim Vips, the chief executive officer at Modera, explained that social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter could become particularly popular, though many may want to oversee more trade than others.

He continued: "Major retailers may very well choose to retain transactions across their own sites because if they relinquish that, then they lose more than control; they may even dilute their brands."

Mr Vips added that many may find they are losing the opportunity to cross over other products, services and deals which the customer may have available to them on the website itself.

His comments follow the announcement from US floral gift retailer and distributor 1-800-Flowers, which opened a Facebook storefront - an application which runs on the social networking site where users can purchase and send flowers.

More than half of small businesses (53 per cent) believe that the most important benefit of outsourcing is guaranteed response times for IT support. London-based Connect conducted the research in 2007.