Marketers might go beyond Twitter and Facebook

Research from May 2011 done by The Pivot Conference and Brian Solis found that two-thirds of marketers were already conducting social media advertising activities, and 18% more planned to do so in the next year. Most agreed that these efforts would prove very valuable, and 54% of those currently running ads were satisfied.Currently, Facebook and, to a lesser extent, Twitter dominate. More than nine in 10 respondents have deployed campaigns on Facebook and 78% have done so on Twitter. But there’s more, plenty more to come, eMarketer suggests based on this research.
While taking a look at the chart below, you can see that marketer’s advertising efforts and their close attention will go beyond Twitter and Facebook. Advertising on sites like YouTube, LinkedIn and Foursquare will grow: at least 20% of survey respondents indicate they would begin campaigns on these sites in the next year.

A very interesting remark that eMarketer’s made in the analysis of the Pivot research is the following:

“Among respondents that don’t currently advertise on social sites but plan to in the next year, 83% believed that simply blogging or tweeting for a company was a form of social advertising. Just 69% cited paid placements or other paid visibility programs on the sites. Social networks that want to encourage uptake of those paid products may have to do more to make them visible and understandable for marketers.”

What, then, is social advertising? I think the way the above described marketers (the 83 %) read it, it’s pullmarketing. That’s an interesting differentiation that comes into play when you’re starting a conversation management strategy. Such a strategy goes beyond advertising, it’s about creating conversations and managing them. And yes, blogging and being active on social media are just wonderful tools to do that.

But… social media paid ADVERTISING is not the same as being active on social media, that’s the message we should take from the research and from the short analysis eMarketer’s made. Looking from that perspective, this finding is also interesting:

“A majority of respondents rated Facebook’s ad offerings excellent or good, but no other social site received such praise. Despite Twitter’s No. 2 ranking in advertiser usage, just 11% thought its ad offerings were excellent. “

Everybody wants to advertise on Twitter, but the ad offerings suck. Such a big indicator we’re just getting started with marketing in the social era 😉