New Research: Social Ad Spending Surpasses Television

New Research: Social Ad Spending Surpasses Television

At some point, surely we all expected this to happen when most of our society is mobile ready. However, projections did not expect it to happen this soon. During 2016, media ad spending saw a rise in social ad volumes that have businesses rethinking their advertising strategies. Let’s examine the details and see where we stand when it comes to advertising budgets and planning ahead.

TV Dramatically Slow While Digital Ads Continue Climbing

Although projections already indicated that 2017 would see sharp rises in digital ad spending, recent studies reveal that TV spending fell below expectations in 2016, with digital rising above that of television.

The results of a recent report show that 2016 TV spending reached $71.29 billion while digital came in at $72.09 billion. As you see, digital came in almost a billion dollars more than TV. The percentages add up to 36.8% for digital media ad spending, while TV earned a few tenths less at 36.4% of the market share.

When considering what areas to hit the hardest with advertising funds, the clear hands down winner is now digital and mobile ad spending.

Social Ads As Well As Video Dominate Digital Advertising World

With media ad spending divided up into four categories, Facebook and Twitter alone comprise $14.38 billion in sales out of the total $72.09 billion. Video, such as YouTube, takes $10.30 billion of the ad revenue. The remaining categories combine for nearly $9 billion of the ad spending.

Although ‘other’ categories are still viable advertising sources, your money is better spent on the Internet where research shows that a company can witness results from social media efforts in only 6 hours. But remember that equates to how much time you spend in maintaining your promotional plans with your social media spending.

Search engine ads still provide a high performance, especially when you consider they focus on the highly targeted audiences of the worldwide market. Google is still a great source for search results that produce excellent results.

Marketers Still Use Facebook as Their Platform of Choice

As of this printing, 55% of marketers use Facebook as their primary social ad spending platform, while 67% of them plan to increase those efforts. Now consider that 86% of social marketers use Facebook ads, and only 18% use Twitter.

The effectiveness rate for Facebook is 66%, while Twitter came in third at 30%, which ranks behind YouTube. Projections show that Twitter will continue to drop

Facebook is still the obvious choice when deciding on how to spend your social media funds, simply because of the number of people using it. However, do not give up on Twitter yet as their Periscope has over 200 million broadcasts, which comprise some 110 years of video. They are still trying to create a means of monetizing it, but the potential is there and well worth watching for future updates.

Video Ads Showing Trends of Growth

If you are among the entrepreneurs who seldom think about video ads, almost 66% plan to use Facebook for social video marketing while only 42% plan to use YouTube. Now consider that 73% of marketers plan to increase their video usage in general and 50% plan to utilize live video, such as Facebook Live, as well as Periscope. The other plan on learning more about this active approach to advertising.

When handheld devices became prevalent, and over two-thirds of the population now has at least one form of mobile device, it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that mobile marketing is the best expenditure of advertising money. Contact us at Lucid Advertising for more information and suggestions to improve your advertising dollars.