Ever since it went public last fall, Twitter’s been courting advertisers left right and center with a slew of ad tech acquisitions and new features. It looks like the hustle is starting to pay off.
A new survey conducted by AdAge of its readers revealed that advertisers expect to increase their spending on Twitter more than they expect to increase spending on Facebook. The survey polled 1,682 executives at marketing, agency and media companies for their opinions on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
Nearly half of respondents — 44% — said they had increased their spending on Twitter over the past 6 months and 63% said they planned to do so over the next year. By comparison, 59% said they expect to spend more on Facebook. And more marketers surveyed said they plan to decrease spending on Facebook (11%) than on Twitter (7%).
That’s certainly encouraging news for Twitter’s masters on Wall Street, who’ll be happy to see the spiking interest from advertisers. While its user growth has been slow, and a source of major concern for its investors, Twitter’s revenues are growing on the back of its added targeting and analytics features, as well as some high-profile deals with television networks.
Facebook on the other hand finds itself frustrating more marketers than inspiring confidence among them. With the much publicized decline in organic reach, social media marketers have given up on managing Facebook pages, as Facebook encourages brands to focus solely on paid efforts. However, the effectiveness of even the paid efforts is now being questioned – a Gallup poll found that 62% of adults said social media ads didn’t affect their purchasing decisions.
While there isn’t a lot of distance between the engagement numbers, Twitter has a real opportunity to carve out a major (and constant) space in the social media budgets of most marketers, a big step up from the occasional investments it received. And unlike Facebook, the organic reach algorithm hasn’t been tweaked, content you post on your Twitter profile are sent to all your followers, making it the one place where brands can experiment with posts, see which one is performing well, and then put a bit of money behind it for amplification. This is now a process sorely lacking from the Facebook profile, and while it currently boasts the strength in numbers, it might not be long before Twitter can lay claim to owning a comparable audience as well.
