E-marketer reported that advertising spend on Social Media 
is expected to increase by 10% each year.
Marketers will be responsible for spending some $2.35 billion on Social Media Advertising (globally) in 2009 (representing a 17% increase over the previous years.
2010 will see another increase in social media advertising spend to $2.6 billion, which will rise by 2013 to $3.5 billion.
21% of the Best In Class companies are actually going to increase their spend on Social Media by at least 25% in 2009 According to The Aberdeen Group, We at WSI expect the rest of the following companies to follow that trend, if not next year then the year after.
We (WSI Huddersfield, West Yorkshire) have found that typically, our Social Media Clients find that visitors from their social media presence will stay on their sites twice as long and are 3 times as likely to buy.
Although Facebook has overtaken MySpace in terms of number of accounts, MySpace still leads the social media advertising spending league, but Facebook are catching up:
MySpace Advertsing 2008 $605m 2009 $520m
Facebook 2008 $250m 2009 $300m
Others have now entered the race with the likes of LinkedIn rapidly growing with its distinct adult professional audience.
In fact the majority of online marketers (65%) are now using Facebook as an integral part of their social media strategy. Meanwhile 49% of e-marketers are now incorporating Twitter into their online social media strategy. Our own findings from our customers around West Yorkshire, Sheffield & Manchester echo this, in fact we find that all Facebook Activity is at least backed up with a Twitter Strategy.
Our client base also echos the e-marketer findings in You Tube (39%) and Linked in (38%) relative usage. We have found a large increase in customers wanting personalised You Tube, Facebook and Twitter pages, while the use of these social media sites to engage with and to also seek out new customers is now a vital plank of any marketing strategy.
Customers who fully engage in the social media process are finding that their sales are up 20% or more on last year.
Delicious & Digg are also being used by 31% of the marketeers that E-Consultancy surveyed.
