Mediarun Search Marketing News

Social media 'will continue to drive website marketing spend'

January 29th 2010

Social Media Optimisation News

Social media platforms will play a significant role in future website marketing, the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) has claimed.

Guy Phillipson, chief executive of the IAB, believes social networking is going to be "inescapable" for advertisers due to the fact that so much of people's time is now spent online.

As such, brand advertising on social media platforms is likely to continue expanding, Mr Phillipson said.

Facebook is currently the second biggest social media site after Google, while Bebo and MySpace also have a strong following. And while Mr Phillipson noted that there is no advertising on Twitter at the moment, he suspects it will probably come in the future.

He advised that people in website marketing who wished to boost their social media potential should "follow an audience and find out what they do all day, then decide where you are going to advertise".

Earlier this week, Facebook and Nielsen announced that Nielsen BrandLift - the tool which enables people in website marketing to measure the effectiveness of their online brand advertising via Facebook - would now be available in the UK.

Designed to help people in website marketing better understand the value of the internet in the overall marketing mix, the product has enjoyed great success in the US since its launch last year.

The latest component of Nielsen's portfolio of website marketing solutions, BrandLift is also the first product from the Facebook-Nielsen partnership to be made available outside the US.

The product uses opt-in polls on Facebook to measure the impact of website marketing on consumer attitudes including brand perception, ad recall and purchase intent.

So far, more than 70 studies have been conducted in the US across the Fmcg, retail, media & entertainment, technology, telecom, financial and automotive sectors.

Nielsen data shows that Facebook had a 10.2 per cent share of display-ad views in the UK in 2009, up from 6.4 per cent in 2008.

Media predictions for 2010 by Deloitte estimated that online advertising spending was likely to grow substantially faster than the total advertising market and continue to gain share.