Posted by 2009 was a big year for Social Media Marketing. 2010 is going to be a bigger year for Social Media Marketing. It’s also going to be a very different year.
That was the overall theme of the news item, Social Network Spending Shifts, from eMarketer yesterday:
"Overall, eMarketer predicts US online social network ad spending will reach more than $1.21 billion in 2009, an increase of 3.9% over last year. 2010 will see stronger growth of 7.1%. With total US online ad spending falling this year, the increase in social network spending also means the sites will account for a greater share of the total, at 5.4%. However, those figures only include paid advertising efforts, which represent just a fraction of all spending."
Breaking that down further, eMarketer is not talking about development, Blogger outreach, community engagement/management, fan pages, online promotions, etc… it’s simply talking about those who will spend money advertising in online social networking environments. Rest assured that the dollar amount invested in everything but the advertising spend is going to be quite significant as well.
And then, there’s the changing face of the landscape…
"2009 will end with major shifts in social network advertising spending. Facebook, at 350 million users worldwide, is the premier destination for marketers in the US and many worldwide markets. It will surpass its former rival, MySpace, in ad revenues in 2010, when marketers worldwide will spend $605 million on Facebook versus $385 million on MySpace."
There’s the rise of Twitter and Foursquare this past year and we’ll see a lot more in terms of new platforms and applications as the iPhone, BlackBerry and Google‘s Android devices become ever-more social as well. The evolution of video and audio will continue and more Blogs (or Social Media-driven content publishers) will play an increasingly important role in the development of New Media.
It all brings us back to that great quote from General Eric Shinseki (via Tom Peters‘ excellent business book, Re-Imagine): "If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less."
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Have you seen any specific details on where the money will be spent? I wonder if we will see strategic targeting or lots of testing on different things – my fear is it’s larger volume of ‘let’s try this’.
And if the increase is buying ads on Facebook, do we consider that social media or advertising – which is rather strange when social media is replacing that old, tired advertising stuff.
I agree it looks like a great year for media/production companies as everyone looks to put more video on sites. I wish that money went to improving the customer experience (customer service, perhaps?) instead of a video that may or may not has the same level of impact as a ‘Wow’ experience.
As a producer of ‘Branded Content’ for social media marketing, and company websites; we already see this upswing in spending. Problem is, most people signing cheques and steering the online campaign aren’t sure how to engage their potential customer in this arena.
There is also confusion on the part of the client over who should be providing their online marketing material: is it their PR company? Web company? Mainline Ad Agency? or do they need to hire a Digital agency?
I’ve watched as this internal struggle leads to duplication, and eventually an ineffectual (and needlessly costly) online campaign.
All the while someone at the table is going on about how Bob in accounting has a video camera and can do this in house…
“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”
Mitch… This is so true…. I conerned about people that are not taking this “social media revelution” serious…. There are going to be some HUGE losers on all this..
What do you think? Best, Brian-
Awesome as usual Mitch. One of the reasons I keep coming back is because I love reading what you have to write. Keep it up! ;D
Mitch, I thought your post was great and included it in my review of a handful of social media experts’ predictions for the industry in 2010, FYI.
http://alexasamuels.com/2009/12/30/2010-predictions-common-threads/
All the best for 2010.
From my experience it appears that social media has been experiemnted with welll in 2009 and this year the emphasis is going to be on proving its worth. With programmes like Google Analytics showing hard ecommerce figures companies are going to want projections on what a campaign will provide.
There are still the non-financial benefits of social media interaction and some of these are not measurable in analytics tools. I agree things are going to change and i think that one of the challenges will be to remind people of the non-financial benefits that can still be gained!
However the statistics I am seeing where I work look very good
as a web marketeer i met with a lot of clients who asked me what is SM ? how they can use it for their own benefit ? My last client, a big hotel chain, asked me to create them a SM presence, a campaign etc. When they realized that they have to interact daily with their clients/possible clients they asked me to stop all the project. They just didn’t want to give answers or mingle with the fans…just cash in and have a nice day.