Posts tagged Facebok

Business marketing teams are switching from paid ads to social networking advertising in 2010 to gain more control because… well, they can.

Marketers shelled out more than $1.2 billion on social networking advertising last year, and that figure will only rise – to $1.3 billion this year – as advertisers aim to leverage their existing social media infrastructure in 2010, according to a new report from eMarketer.

In its social media outlook, the research firm found that advertisers plan to devote their social media resources this year on maintaining their social networks rather than growing them through paid ads. Many marketers made the investments last year in creating fan pages on Facebook, running ads on MySpace and developing the overall strategy for social media, said Debra Williamson, the eMarketer senior analyst who wrote the report. Now, they’ll look to nurture those audiences.

This shift points to a broader philosophical change, as marketers create their own audiences, rather than rent them. Brands want to invest money in building out audiences rather than just renting through TV, radio and magazines (the old way.) Example … Pepsi pulled out of the Super Bowl after 23 years to develop its own audience through its Pepsi Refresh Project online.

Marketers are looking for better ways to quantify and measure social messaging that surrounds their brands is a summary of what Williamson said. “Whenever you do a paid online campaign, you guess or estimate how many impressions you are going to get, and now they are trying to figure out how much earned media they’ll get,” she said. Read the rest of this entry »