There’s a roundup of some new interesting advertising based facts by the team at Econsultancy. Some are quite surprising too, with IAB reporting that UK online ad spend actually went up in 2008, though I wonder if that increases will be repeated in 2009.
The one that most caught my eye though was from a survey which reports that Facebook is the destination of choice for online retailers who want to engage with social media.
The report into the US market, dubbed Social Commerce on Facebook, Twitter and Retail Sites, indicates that 57 per cent of companies in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide have a presence on the website.
It also concludes that as many as 75 per cent of these firms utilise at least one of the major social networking sites or social shopping sites to advertise or make their brand known.
According to Jeffrey Grau, who penned the report, said: “Retailers need to place their virtual storefronts where their customers congregate.”
It would be every interesting to see comparative figures for the UK. I guess that many top retail online sites do have a presence on the social networking site, but that figure probably isn’t as high as 75%.
It would be even more interesting to disover figures for non retail brands
Since Facebook changed its offering for brands earlier in the year it has become an excellent place for companies to create pages which not only engages Facebook users but also act as online hubs that pull and push content from other websites like Twitter and YouTube. Shiny Red has worked on several of these types of sites now (like this one) and they have proved very effective at bringing brands closer to their customers.
