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Despite recent high-profile news coverage about social media advertising, it has remained a notoriously small part of the total online advertising pie. However, newly released revenue figures for online advertising, plans by more firms to increase social media budgets, and a host of new tools to better leverage Facebook and Twitter may elevate the status of social media advertising next year.

A 1.7% Increase

New figures released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) show a slight uptick in online ad revenues for Q309, to nearly $5.5 billion. This represents a month-over-month increase of 1.7% from Q209. In contrast to the online numbers, the overall Q309 numbers declined by 5.4% over the same period last year.

Getting Social Media to Pay Off

Though much of this drop is because of the recession, the wait for an economic turnaround - especially amidst new government and consumer data that suggest recovery is less robust that initially thought - means marketers must double down on all potential growth avenues, even the nascent social media categories.

New figures from an Econsultancy study show these channels are becoming more important to marketers. In the newly released Social Media and Online PR Report, Econsultancy and bigmouthmedia found that more firms are planning to increase social media spending next year and - more intriguingly to those loitering on the sidelines of this space - that those firms that have focused heavily on these channels have made it pay off.

An overwhelming majority of companies (86%) surveyed plan to spend more money on social media in 2010, and a further 13% are planning to keep the same budget levels. The research also indicated that many companies experimenting with social media have yet to reap any measurable benefits. Only one-fourth of companies say  they have gained "real, tangible value" from social media whereas 60% say that they have gained "some benefit but nothing concrete."

The report does go on to say that those companies who have efforts in this area have typically reaped some reward. More than half (52%) who are heavily involved in social media advertising say that they have gained real value, compared with only 13% of companies who have "experimented but not done much."

New Tools

At the same time there have been a number of new tools introduced to aid companies navigating these channels. Many are focused on integrating e-mail with social media. "Push to Social" buttons, for example, allow e-mail marketers to push content to social networks. And new web analytic tools are also being developed to mine data from these channels. Twitter, in particular, has seen a crop of third-party applications spring up to help brands measure the influence of Tweeters.