While we see new reports nearly every day spelling out the growth mobile marketing and advertising is experiencing, a new report released today by Informa indicates social network ad-revenue is on the rise in a big way as well.
The report indicates US mobile social networking alone will reach revenues of $421 million during 2010, marking a 50% increase overall. It continues to say the U.S. mobile social networking market will continue it’s robust growth into 2013 when it’s projected to breakthrough the $1 billion revenue mark.
This is interesting because a majority of the industry still believes mobile messaging of some kind is the key component to mobile marketing, when in fact, a huge surge in advertising via social networks such as Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt and others is seeing some of the largest growth at the moment.
Since the term “mobile marketing” is ambiguous at best to most people, SMS and mobile Websites remain the primary channels that come to mind. The true definition of mobile marketing is “practices that enables organizations to communicate and engage with their audience in an interactive and relevant manner through any mobile device or network,” as defined by the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), opening up a wide variety of channels that fall within the broad definition.
Social networking, and its integrated advertising opportunities, are as “interactive” as it can get, signifying huge potential for brands, and according to this report, those brands are already taking notice.