Where does the money go?

Image from seoconsulting.nl

“Advertising” has been the key word in my posts and I have explored it from different aspects. I have written about funny, bad and creative ads; compared advertising in TV to advertising in social networks or talked about the social benefits from advertising etc. This time I will explore the word “advertising” in a more data-oriented way and provide some hints about the platforms companies use for their advertising purposes.

According to a research conducted by Econsultancy.com, based on responses from business representatives, resulted that businesses spend most of their "social advertising budgets" on Facebook-41%. While, according to the responses from ad agencies’ representative, the percentage is even higher: 53% of clients’ total spending on advertising goes to Facebook. On the other hand, companies spend only 18% on LinkedIn and less on Twitter (only 17%). The rest goes to other social platforms.

Regarding the types of social advertising please refer to the picture below:

As it can be understood from the graph above, the best advertising tool among all social networks is considered to be Facebook. Newsfeed ads are actually much more preferred from advertisers when compared to LinkedIn ads or Promoted Tweets.

There is a reason why Facebook rules the social advertising world (as of now).  The reason is, because it offers a platform where creating ads is fairly simple and flexible; targeting is easy and can be done taking many factors into consideration (such as gender, age, geographical area, education, etc.); it can reach a large proportion of the world population (think about 1.3 billion users of Facebook). And, above all, ads on Facebook are not that extremely costly since the platform is still underutilized.  Moreover, the platform keeps expanding its operation further. Think about the acquisitions made by Facebook: Instagram and WhatsApp. These factors have a great impact on the whole social media world and eventually impact the advertising strategies of different businesses.

There is a major question that arises from this analysis. Will the distribution of advertising spending in different platforms change, and if so, how long will that take?