Social Media Spend increases

The world is changing fast. Let's have a look at the state of a couple of the statistics both globally and here in South Africa to understand the latest trends and what this means for the future in terms of advertising spend on Social Media. A Global View I think it is clear that South Africa lags the US in terms of digital ad spend so this is a view on the trend we could expect in the next couple of years. In summary: Digital ad spend in the US increases from 12% to 21% in 2014 Social Media Spend goes from $716 Million to $3.1 Billion in the US by 2014 But is this spend actually validated? What we see to the left are the results of research done by Hitwise. This relates the percentage of visits to Facebook versus Google and the results are astounding. The week ending 13 March 2010 sees Facebook overtake Google for the first time. But what does this mean for South Africans? A list of the top 10 South African sites by Alexa sees global sites dominating our audience's eyeballs with only 2 local sites making the top 10. google.co.za facebook.com google.com yahoo.com youtube.com wikipedia.org twitter.com blogger.com gumtree.co.za news24.com Further more, of the top 10 sites, it could be argued that 9 are social or offer social features. But lets look a bit further at the unique visitors from South Africa using Google Trends SA Unique Vistors what we see is Facebook certainly dominating the South African Audience. You are invited to try your own searches.