The State of Social Media Advertising in 2009
By 2009 Facebook had passed 300 million users and opened self-serve ads to any business, while Twitter's audience kept growing with no ad product of its own.
Social media advertising in 2009 is a story about one platform pulling ahead while others are still figuring out whether to monetize their audience at all. Here’s where the landscape stands.
Facebook’s self-serve ads are now accessible
Facebook passed 200 million active users at the start of the year and has kept climbing since, and its self-serve ad platform, born out of the Social Ads product launched back in late 2007, has matured into something a small business can run without an agency or a sales rep. Advertisers can target by age, location, gender and stated interests, set their own daily budget and choose between paying per click or per thousand impressions. That combination, real targeting granularity plus a self-serve interface, is what separates Facebook from most of what came before it in display advertising.
Beacon is gone, and that matters more than it might seem
Facebook shut down Beacon this fall as part of a settlement of the class-action lawsuit the tool had triggered back when it launched in 2007, and the company set up an independent foundation as part of that resolution. The shutdown is a useful marker for the platform’s advertising products broadly: default-on data sharing without clear consent was a real misstep, and its removal signals that Facebook’s future ad targeting is going to run through data users have more visibly agreed to share, like their own interests and Page activity, rather than passively broadcast purchase history from third-party sites.
Twitter has an audience but still no ads
Twitter’s user base has grown quickly this year, boosted by mainstream attention and high-profile users driving signups, but the company has been explicit that it isn’t focused on advertising yet. There’s no promoted content product, no ad auction, nothing a marketer can currently buy. Some businesses are experimenting with organic use, running a company account and engaging directly, but that’s marketing effort, not paid advertising, and anyone budgeting for social ad spend in 2009 should treat Twitter as a channel to watch rather than one to plan a paid campaign around.
MySpace is still large but clearly past its peak influence
MySpace remains a sizable audience, particularly for music and entertainment-focused advertisers, and it still sells display and sponsorship inventory. But the energy and growth in the category have clearly shifted toward Facebook this year, and advertisers who split social budget between the two are, in most cases, seeing Facebook’s targeting and engagement outperform MySpace’s broader but less structured audience.
LinkedIn quietly offers a narrower but useful option
For business-to-business advertisers specifically, LinkedIn’s self-serve ad platform, running since 2005, offers targeting by job title, industry and company size that neither Facebook nor MySpace can match. It’s a smaller audience overall, but for the right advertiser, a B2B software company or a recruiting firm, it’s arguably the most precisely targeted paid social option available today, even if it rarely gets the attention Facebook does.
The takeaway for 2009
If a business is going to put real budget into social media advertising this year, Facebook is where that budget belongs first, on the strength of its scale, self-serve tooling and genuine targeting depth. LinkedIn is worth a look for anyone selling to other businesses. Everything else in the category, Twitter especially, is still worth watching closely, but not yet worth a line item.
Keep exploring: browse more Paid Advertising guides, see everything we published in 2009 or check out the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
