Lately, the WSI published their 2009 Social Media Trends Report focusing on the global statistics of current social media marketing trends. Here are their findings:
- that Social Media Marketing is Rapidly Growing in Popularity;
- eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit found that 42% of marketers worldwide plan to increase their marketing spending via social media, while 35.5% plan to maintain their current budgets;
- Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn were found to be the most popular among professional and Personal users;
- the top 3 areas seen to increase in online marketing spending are Social, Search and Mobile;
- the majority of online marketers (65%) use Facebook as part of their marketing strategy;
- eMarketer projects that social networking advertising spending worldwide will increase each year by about 10%;
- that in 2008 alone, two million unique visitors participated in Facebook – with a 116% increase over the previous year;
- that Social networking ranks second in importance behind Web services, among Web 2.0 technologies that companies worldwide use (32%);
- Executive marketers worldwide identified the following benefits of social media:
- Business exposure
- Increased traffic, subscribers and opt‐in list
- New business partnerships
- Higher search rankings
- Qualified leads
- Reduction in overall marketing expenses
- More closed business
The statistics issued by WSI reveal that the worldwide population of online marketers using social media such as Facebook continues to grow and is seen to grow by 10% each year till 2013. The people behind this social media explosion will not dare spending billions of dollars if not for the sure rewards and great benefits social media sites like Facebook brings to their coffers. Business exposure, increased traffic-subscribers and op-in list and new business partnerships are the most popular reasons why marketers started integrating social media marketing using Facebook, Youtube, LinkedIn, etc. into their marketing strategy.
Article By Giessel Razavi
