The Changing Face Of Social Media Marketing

2009 was a big year for Social Media Marketing. 2010 is going to be a bigger year for Social Media Marketing. It’s also going to be a very different year.

That was the overall theme of the news item, Social Network Spending Shifts, from eMarketer yesterday:

"Overall, eMarketer predicts US online social network ad spending will reach more than $1.21 billion in 2009, an increase of 3.9% over last year. 2010 will see stronger growth of 7.1%. With total US online ad spending falling this year, the increase in social network spending also means the sites will account for a greater share of the total, at 5.4%. However, those figures only include paid advertising efforts, which represent just a fraction of all spending."

Breaking that down further, eMarketer is not talking about development, Blogger outreach, community engagement/management, fan pages, online promotions, etc… it’s simply talking about those who will spend money advertising in online social networking environments. Rest assured that the dollar amount invested in everything but the advertising spend is going to be quite significant as well.

And then, there’s the changing face of the landscape…

"2009 will end with major shifts in social network advertising spending. Facebook, at 350 million users worldwide, is the premier destination for marketers in the US and many worldwide markets. It will surpass its former rival, MySpace, in ad revenues in 2010, when marketers worldwide will spend $605 million on Facebook versus $385 million on MySpace."

There’s the rise of Twitter and Foursquare this past year and we’ll see a lot more in terms of new platforms and applications as the iPhone, BlackBerry and Google‘s Android devices become ever-more social as well. The evolution of video and audio will continue and more Blogs (or Social Media-driven content publishers) will play an increasingly important role in the development of New Media.

It all brings us back to that great quote from General Eric Shinseki (via Tom Peters‘ excellent business book, Re-Imagine): "If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less."