Jack Myers: The marketing value of social networking sites in the United States is expected to reach 1.728 billion US dollars in 2011

Jack Myers has calculated the marketing and advertising value of American online social networking sites in the next few years. In the two statistics, Jack Myers predicts that in 2011, the marketing value (word-of-mouth marketing and conversational marketing) generated on American online social networking sites will reach 1.728 billion US dollars, while the online advertising value generated on American online social networking sites will reach 1.395 billion US dollars during the same period. However, this is the first time that the marketing value generated on American online social networking sites has exceeded the advertising value generated by them.

Figure 1. Revenue and growth rate of word-of-mouth and dialogue marketing on social networking sites in the United States from 2007 to 2012

Figure 2. Advertising revenue and growth rate of social networking sites in the United States from 2008 to 2011

Facebook is currently the world's largest social networking site, with revenue exceeding $1 billion in 2009, but its CPM (cost per thousand impressions) is only $20, much lower than other types of websites, such as large portals with a large amount of traffic. The same problem also plagues large social networking sites such as Twitter, which is said to have achieved profitability by relying on previous cooperation with Google, Microsoft, etc.

According to FT, more than 80% of major advertisers in the United States are using Facebook for marketing, and there are also many companies using Twitter for marketing. The special activity tracks of users on social networking sites seem to make the simple and extensive advertising in the past insufficient to attract users' attention, and it is said that the click-through rate of ads on Facebook does not exceed 1%. After having a huge user base and being able to understand user behavior in various ways, social networking sites continue to build an equally large, more real, and even real-time (such as Twitter and other microblogs) user behavior database. Perhaps, as Fortune magazine said, Facebook's strategy is not just advertising. This may be applicable to quite a number of social networking sites.

Reprinted from: //www.internet2share.com/?p=3219