Marketing firms are expected to spend $3.08 billion for online social media ads in the United States in 2011 an amount equal to 11% of the overall online market ad space according to a recent study by eMarketer .
If you consider that during 2010 the overall ad spend for social media was $1.99 billion in the United States that would be a 55% increase for social media spending.
Internationally social media spending is expected to increase by 71.6% to $5.97 billion. At those numbers worldwide social media spending will increase by 8.7%.
As would be expected, Facebook will take the largest chunk of that spending, with sales expected to reach $4 billion on the social network in 2011 of which $2.19 billion will come from U.S. advertisers.
If you take Facebook’s ad revenue of $1.86 billion in 2010 into consideration that’s an increase of more than 50%
If Facebook continues their massive growth, they could see an even larger increase through 2011, which could in turn help them capitalize on more of the expected money already being spent or possibly open up the market to even larger numbers.