Advertisers looking to social media

Advertisers are increasingly looking to social media sites as the population spends more and more time online, it has been suggested.

With sites such as Facebook and Twitter becoming staple parts of national social interaction, advertisers are keen to cash in on the trend, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB).

In addition, the recent release of software to monitor the effectiveness of internet advertising from Nielsen means that advertisers can now track exactly how effective their campaigns are.

Guy Phillipson, chief executive of IAB, said: 'In the end you need to follow an audience and find out what they do all day to decide where you are going to advertise … So they will with social media online.

'Facebook, after Google, is the biggest site, and of course you have Bebo and MySpace. So much of our time spent online [is] within social [networking] and that's going to be inescapable for advertisers … there is no advertising on Twitter at the moment but it will probably come.'

Facebook had a 10.2 per cent share of display-ad views in the UK in 2009, according to Nielsen.