Search Marketing Blog
2010 Outlook – Social Media Marketing Growth and Impact
Posted by Sean McMahon on 12.24.2009
As 2009 comes to a close, it is evident that Social Media Marketing is having a direct impact upon how brands interact with their target audience. Forward-thinking companies are beginning to spend a significant amount of advertising dollars on reaching-out to online communities and ‘influencers’ through various popular social networks. In fact, the digital research and analysis company, eMarketer, estimates in their report titled Social Network Ad Spending: 2010 Outlook that companies will spend more than $2.2 billion on Social Media Marketing efforts world-wide this year, with more than half of that amount coming from the United States.
In 2010, eMarketer projects that domestic advertising expenditures within social media networks will increase approximately seven percent (+7%) to more than $1.3 billion. This forecast equates to an impressive 5.5% of all projected online ad spending in the coming year. Of this $1.3 billion anticipated to be spent in 2010, Facebook will capture almost 25%, compared approximately 20% in 2009.
It is important to acknowledge however, that companies gain the greatest value through Social Media Marketing by having genuine engagements with their target audience on social networking platforms, and not by flooding them with banner ads. As eMarketer states, “Marketers will continue to make social networks a priority for 2010, but a significant portion of their spending will go toward building and maintaining a social network presence. Paid social network advertising will remain somewhat of an afterthought.”
As we have realized here at EngineWorks, Social Media Marketing is most effective when it is earned through authentic two-way communication that builds personal relationships and trust between our clients’ brands and their target audience. Thus, our outlook for this exciting, new channel in the coming year (and beyond), is an ever-increasing push for companies to have online social activities and connections ‘baked-in’ to every form of digital content, including their Web sites, search engines, shopping engines, entertainment portals, and even traditional media channels.
This view is punctuated by the following eMarketer statement, “2010 will be a year in which social network advertising will intersect with other kinds of advertising. Concepts such as earned media (the additional unpaid exposure a brand gets when consumers share about the brand online), local social advertising, social search and social ad networks will be key themes next year.”
We look forward to continuing to development new avenues of marketing success for our clients through our creative social media strategies and promotions in 2010.
