Social media marketing is certainly a big topic in many circles, and you’ve probably read a lot of headlines that declare its exponential growth or the vast amount of resources being spent on it.
However, reports – such as this one – also point out that social media only claims 3-6% of overall ad spending. But before you let that teeny number discourage you from getting enthusiastic over social media as a serious avenue for marketing, take a look at the reasons why it looks so small. 
1. Social media advertising is cheap. Compared to any other form of advertising, you can get far more impressions per dollar – and that’s ignoring the inherent ability to instantly convert pageviews to sales not present in other media forms.
2. Most of the actual cost of social media marketing isn’t going to ads – the money is being spent on labor and management costs such as building pages, community management, application development, and so on. Of course, this is how it should be: effective and strategic social marketing instead of simply maximizing ad space and pageviews.
3. A portion of media dollars are spent on social efforts that are closely integrated with social media, driving traffic to communities, content, and applications, but this money doesn’t fall directly under the social media spending category because the advertising isn’t actually on social media Web sites.
In the near future, it’s safe to say that social media spending will continue to increase (estimates indicate doubling over the next year), but the increase will be difficult to measure reliably because of social media marketing’s untraditional form.
Companies have to acknowledge that social media marketing requires two extra types of investments: People and expertise to drive the strategies, rather than simply more media; and the complementary media and programs such as social community investments that are necessary to fully support social media initiatives.
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