Social media spending trends for 2010: engagement, not ads

A recent eMarketer survey/article shed some light on where online marketers plan to put their social media program dollars over the next few years -- not on ads, but on engagement. Compare these 2 charts:

#1 - Social Site Ad Spend

 

#2 - Social Media Marketing Outreach

Look how much faster the second chart grows. This is huge. It's one thing to spend more dollars and distribute more ads, but it's a whole different bag of tricks to actually reach out and get more deeply engaged with your customers and prospects. eMarketer senior analyst Debra Aho Williamson suggests that savvy companies will be spending the bulk of their time and resources on:

• creating and maintaining fan pages
• managing promotions or public relations outreach within social networks
• measuring the impact of a social network presence on brand health and sales

We've already seen Facebook and Twitter eclipse Google (though I've yet to see those sources bring my B2B sites more traffic or leads -- SEO is still going strong!), so these are green fields ripe for innovation. And Jive is helping companies explore these channels, with its online community software and social media monitoring and engagement solutions, so it's exciting to be in the thick of it. From a marketing perspective, we have some big plans for 2010 that involve creative social media initiatives (as opposed to just rolling out more ads to the masses)... stay tuned!