Two studies show that Facebook is the preferred choice in social advertising by a broad margin. However, digital advertising on the whole is growing, and many other social sites (e.g., LinkedIn, YouTube) should receive extra love over the next year.
Two studies have shown that Facebook is the preferred choice in social advertising by a broad margin. However, digital advertising on the whole is growing, and Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+, and Foursquare should all be receiving extra love over the next year.
According to eMarketer, 80 percent of companies with over 100 employees conducted at least some social media marketing in the last year, and that number is growing. Meanwhile, professional marketers are continuing to gain interest.
A recently published eMarketer study showed that two-thirds of marketers currently run social media ad campaigns, and an additional 18 percent planned to do so within the next year. A survey from Strata confirms that digital advertising is on the rise, with 24 percent of advertisers using digital ads as their preferred mode of advertising. Digital still falls short of television ads, which had a 41 percent preference.
Within digital advertising, social advertising ranked at third, below both display ads on non-social sites (78 percent of those using digital advertising used this method) and search ads (64 percent). But when picking up a social network, where in the social world are these people going?
Why, to Facebook, of course! The eMarketer study showed that 93 percent of marketers using social are currently using Facebook, and an additional 5 percent plan to use Facebook in the coming year.
Compare this to Twitter, which is used by 79 percent of marketers, and YouTube, which is used by only 66 percent. The remaining social networks fall even further behind, with LinkedIn and Foursquare, the fourth and fifth place networks, being used by 44 percent and 16 percent of social marketers, respectively.
The Strata study shows a similar dominance for Facebook. 81 percent of respondents in the Strata survey who used social media in their campaigns used Facebook. Twitter again earned second, but was incorporated by only 39 percent of qualified respondents.
When discussing their plans for the future, both the Strata survey respondents and the marketers surveyed by eMarketer indicated a plan to adopt a broader social strategy. YouTube, LinkedIn, and Foursquare had the largest visible interest, with 20, 21, and 26 percent of marketers intending to adopt a campaign on the respective platform in the next year.
That’s not going to hurt Facebook, though. In addition to the predicted $2.19 billion in revenue this year, Facebook had the highest satisfaction rating among social network advertisers. 69 percent of those rating Facebook deemed it “good” or “excellent,” compared to 46 percent for YouTube and 36 percent for Twitter.