Today, Donanza released its quarerly State of the Work-From-Home and Freelance economy. They gathered their data using the fourth quarter numbers of the freelance marketing project numbers for all of 2010.
If you haven’t heard about Donana, this is a company that has created a unique search engine technology for the purpose of searching through available work at home and freelance jobs across the internet. They then place this technology on their job board. This gives them the advantage of being able to display a healthy backfull of projects from other reputable companies such as odesk, freelancer, and elance, on their job board while at the same time allowing people to post their own jobs.
You can sign up free to get your own Donanza Job Board here.
Of course, this technology also gives them access to more complete data concerning the freelance and work at home job market which they discuss in their report.
Social Media Marketing on Track to Surpass Classic Search Engine Marketing (SEM vs. SEO)
According to the data from Donana, Social Media Marketing jobs have grown by 67% compared to 2009. This is very indicative that this is a growing trend. These freelance projects are growing at a faster rate than search engine marketing projects at 33%.
What does this mean?
It indicates that more employers are hiring people for social media jobs. In fact, that market is growing twice as fast as search engine marketing.
What is even more interesting is that the social media jobs actually have a higher average budget than the search engine marketing projects.
This probably makes sense since this is a growing market, skilled employees may demand higher pay than the more saturated search engine market. However, it also shows the willingness of companies to spend more money in SMM than in SEO. Is that because they believe it’s a better investment? Good information for the freelancer looking for social media jobs
Now if you are looking to use this data to leverage yourself in social media marketing then take a look at which company dominates the market
Facebook anyone? The number of projects involving Facebook marketing is just staggering compared with the other social media jobs. While this may not be surprising to most people, this data is helpful in two ways.
- It’s likely that using Facebook as a marketing platform is probably the most effective of all the social media outlets. Why else would these companies put so much effort into Facebook marketing? From a marketing perspective, it shows us that having a Facebook presence is essential
- Strategically, from looking at this chart, it tells us overwhelmingly that the majority of your competition is focusing it’s marketing efforts on Facebook. Perhaps it may not be a bad strategy to focus you social media marketing efforts in one of the other platforms to avoid heavy competition. For instance, your conversion rates from Twitter and Linkedin may be much better than on Facebook because there is less competition in those markets.
Knowing that the facebook social media market is a growing commodity, freelancers may want to highlight their familiarity with Facebook when searching for social media jobs.
Final Thoughts
Historically, SEO has been touted as the best way to get traffic to your blog. However, with google constantly changing their search engine formula and the growth of the social media jobs market, it won’t be long before Social Media Marketing may surpass SEO.
We read a lot of speculation about the possible trending of Social Media Marketing. Now we have the emperical data to back up these theories.
If you’re not active in social media, it’s a good time to get started. Social media jobs are definitely on the rise.
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Richard is a full time professional, husband, father and blogger juggling all the responsibilities of life and running a blog. Richard enjoys writing about life and online money matters.
Social media marketing has grown very well because most of the folks are using the social media marketing like face book and so on. Its my point of view.
That's true, the companies are going to where the people are spending most of their time.
I think that companies just orientate themselves over what their annalists have to say and their annalists look at this charts, then conclude that social media is the way to go, this way those numbers will increase even more.
Of course everything has to start from somewhere, and I think that the signal for social media was shouted when facebook became the website with most visitors, surpassing google.
Now, I think that social media really is great for business, mainly because it's exactly what they want. Exposure for their brand and interaction with their customers without the need to fiddle with all the seo.
I have proof. I used Tweetdeck to simply retweet my own pages – with different titles – every day for a while. And it totaly paid off. I used the #1 hashtag for my niche. And the traffic is flowing in. Pretty simple actually. But it requires spinning my title quite a bit to find people with interest in variations of the niche.
I think that search through social media will surpass search through traditional search engines because search engines have failed to deliver what 95% of people want. Search results from traditional search engines nowadays are dominated by sites that duplicate content from the original source or that use a site structure (how-to, encyclopaedia, wiki) that fools the search engine into unwarranted high page ranking.
I agree. We are hearing more and more stories of bad search results due to content farming and google is always on the defensive. So people are turning back to old tried and true methods of word of mouth.
Social Media should be a part of any 'real' SEO strategy anyway; so if you're not, you probably should. As Richard said above "people are turning back to old tried and true methods of word of mouth. " SMO is apart of that
Hey there Richard! It was nice visiting you again and learn new things from you too. Anyway, I think social media works are much needed nowadays.
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Hey there Richard! It was nice visiting you again and learn new things from you too. Anyway, I think social media works are much needed nowadays. In fact i am mostly liked this work rather than anything else.
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I really liked reading this blog and got to know much about from here. Thanks for the worthy sharing. Waiting for your next blog!
Hi.. I do agree with your thoughts. Social media marketing is definitely on the rise.
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