According to a new report from the market research company eMarketer, 2014 will see an increase in social media marketing initiatives as more funds are dedicated to social advertising. This is not a shot-in-the-dark approach, but rather a sound investment as social media platforms continue to provide better targeting data and deliver more and better ways to evaluate marketing ROI.
The study, “Social Media Advertising: Seven Trends for 2014,” estimates that marketers using social media will increase to 88% in the coming year, up from the numbers for 2013. Leading this surge will be Facebook, whose efforts to “simplify and prove the effectiveness of its ad products” in the last year established the foundation from which to build. According to the survey, “…Facebook has delivered scale and efficiency, and will continue to pull mobile dollars in 2014.”
To confirm this projected growth, eMarketer cited a study co-authored by RBC Capital Markets in conjunction with Advertising Age. That survey revealed that in September of 2013, Facebook ranked a single tenth of a percentage point behind leader Google in terms of ROI when it came to advertising. Twitter, LinkedIn, and Yahoo were a distant third through fifth, respectively.
In a final observation, the eMarketer report acknowledges the tremendous gains achieved by social media in 2013, and predicts that trend will continue not only in 2014, but in 2015 as well.
Reference:
eMarketer. “The Year of Social? Nearly nine in ten marketers will use social media marketing next year.” November 14, 2013.
