Research reveals social media marketing is booming

In a sure sign that social media is becoming an entrenched pillar of the marketing mix, social media marketing freelance jobs have grown by 67% in the last year. This according to a quarterly report from DoNanza, an Israeli-based search engine which researches work-from-home projects. The search engine aggregates information from freelance sites such as elance, odesk and others on related online projects.

The quarterly report, which is released on Monday, focuses on social media marketing — an exploration into search engine marketing and the practise of marketing via social media platforms such Facebook and Twitter. The data was gathered from more than 150 000 projects on hundreds of marketplaces and sites from all across the web.

Key findings of the DoNanza report include:

• Marketing channel share of total project count


“The shift towards social media marketing indicates that businesses believe that the potential value of social marketing is higher than any other online marketing channel”, says Liran Kotzer, CEO of DoNanza.

“I believe there are many reasons for this: First, the huge number of people spending their time on social environments such as Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, and the fact that social networks are here to stay and people are learning how to use them for business.”

• Social marketing projects have strong web budgets


The DoNanza data shows that social media marketing projects have higher budgets than search engine marketing projects. The average social marketing budget was US$1090, compared to US$683 for the average search engine marketing project.

“Social projects typically require more creativity and may involve application development and novel solutions for engaging with customers” says Kotzer. “In addition, since social projects are a recent addition, there are fewer experienced individuals that can take the job.”

• Facebook dominates social media marketing


Facebook dominates social media freelance jobs, with projects varying from the creation of fan pages to application development and segmented advertising. Twitter is number two with projects helping businesses to create viral marketing tools as well as customer communications and service.

Facebook and Linkedin marketing projects seem to have grown the most. MySpace projects have dropped by 46% with LinkedIn and Facebook projects growing at 103% and 120% respectively. Twitter growth is smaller, reflecting the fact that Twitter projects tend to differ from other “classic” social marketing projects that involve applications, brand building.

• The Top 50 requested skills



iPad development and creative writing and a drop in SQL and Xhtml projects. iPad demand grew by 86%, climbing 10 spots in the list. The average iPad development project budget is US$1551, but the availability of experts seems to push budgets down, with a 11.5% decrease in the average iPad budget from third quarter to the fourth quarter.

Creative writing skills are in high demand, climbing 12 spots in the list with a 59% increase in project count. “Demand for at-home writing skills is definitely growing, according to our project data”, said Kotzer, “The availability of a variety of writing styles and projects, from creative to technical writing, means that good writers can obtain interesting and lucrative at-home work”.