Study: Paid social continues to grow across major platforms

Dive Brief:

Using data from December 2016, ClickZ Intelligence predicts advertisers are increasing paid social spending this year per eMarketer.
The big beneficiary of the spending increase is Facebook with 61% of ad professionals worldwide planning on spending more with the social media giant an only 7% reporting plans to decrease spending on the platform. EMarketer predicted that Facebook will take in more than two-thirds of social media ad revenue in 2017.
Facebook’s Instagram tied with LinkedIn for the second spot with 40% of ad pros expecting to increase spending on those platforms. The rest of the top seven rounded out with Twitter (27%), Snapchat (19%), Pinterest (16%) and Tumblr (6%). Snapchat seems to remain something of a niche platform, something that could also be reflected in 48% of respondents reporting it was “not relevant” for paid social.

Dive Insight:

Overall, the ClickZ research illustrates a robust paid social marketplace. While Facebook’s large lead shouldn’t surprise anyone, the fact that a range of social media platforms look to benefit from new ad revenue suggests marketers are finding success connecting with niche audiences on social media. Additionally, marketers may be increasing their spend on some of the smaller platforms as these social media sites boost their advertising offerings.

The relatively strong interest in LinkedIn, for example, could stem from new ad opportunities around InMail campaigns, per eMarketer.

The fact that 27% of marketers plan to increase their spend on Twitter points to the platform's enduring appeal, even as it continues to face slow growth, for reaching consumers in real-time, particularly around live sports and other live events. However, Twitter also had the most respondents reporting plans to decrease spending on the platform at 11%.

Still, more marketers are planning to increase their spend on Twitter than for Snapchat, suggesting the latter remains very much a niche play for reaching younger consumers. It will be interesting to see if marketer interest in Snapchat grows now that the company has completed its initial public offering of stock and is likely to start investing in building the platform. However, like Twitter, Snapchat is dealing with slow user growth.