Facebook is Driving Ad Revenue, Are You?

In a recent eMarketer article about social network advertising to account for 10.8% of online market, this year U.S. marketers will spend $3.08 billion on social media advertising. To the average marketing analyst, that's not surprising. Social network advertising, especially on Facebook, has skyrocketed in the past year. More and more companies are jumping on the "social media bandwagon", and some brands on Facebook are doing a fantastic job at it.



Many brands want to know - what's in it for me? Let's take a look at the increasing growth in social network advertising over the years.



According to eMarketer, "Spending will be up 55% over the $1.99 billion advertisers devoted to social networks in 2010 and will rise by a further 27.7% next year to reach nearly $4 billion."

2011 and it's dramatic growth will bring social media advertising spend to 10% of the total U.S. dollars dished online. According to the eMarketer study, "Worldwide, where social network ad spending will rise 71.6% to $5.97 billion, that proportion will be somewhat lower, at 8.7%."

There is no doubt that 2010 was the year of Facebook. Did anyone hear of that little engine that could, The Social Network?

”2010 was the year that Facebook firmly established itself as a major force not only in social network advertising but all of online advertising,” said eMarketer principal analyst Debra Aho Williamson, author of the upcoming report “Worldwide Social Network Ad Spending: 2011 Outlook.” “In 2011, its global presence is something multinational advertisers can’t ignore.”

Want more proof of how powerful social networks are driving ad revenue? Go to http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1008180.

Google’s Struggle With Social Networking

Once all a buzz, this week Google announced that Google Wave was no more. They no longer plan to develop it as a standalone product. It seemed as if Google Wave never really took off, as many people struggled to find meaningful ways to use it. I wonder if it is because many people use existing communication tools such as Twitter and Facebook, and Google Wave was just too much to integrate into people's lives. Also, it was exclusive at one point, and many people did not have access to it, which may have hurt the success of Wave as well. Google is continuing to work on launching a social product, although so far, they haven’t been very successful yet. Another Google product, Google Buzz, hasn’t gotten much traction either, even though it is integrated into Gmail - which many people use daily as their email client.

I personally use Google Buzz since I use Google Reader and like to share blog posts with my followers there, but only those who follow me on Google Buzz see it, which isn’t many. Because many of my friends use Facebook and Twitter, I see more response there when it comes to sharing news or interesting blog posts. Unless Google can find a way to integrate through Twitter and Facebook, it’s likely that they won’t see much success – unless they create something bigger and better than these two very popular social networking tools.