Social media advertising continues to be quite huge this year, and will no doubt get even bigger in the years ahead, expected to grow to $15 billion by 2018. North America will play a huge part in that, accumulating 40 percent of the overall growth leading into 2016, with Facebook leading the charge as the preferred platform across nine out of ten marketers (while Twitter is behind with one in four).

With that, Mediabistro, with the help of Inveep, has compiled a special infographic that breaks down the social media ad spending trends and statistics for the year. It’s a huge amount of data, but it serves as helpful information for marketers and companies leading into the New Year. Here are some of the basic facts:

 

  • U.S. social media advertising revenue will increase by 194 percent over the next three years, which is a $1.5 billion jump from last year, translating to a 24 percent annual growth rate.
  • For the past year, U.S. social mobile ad revenues came in at $1.5 billion. However, in just five years’ time, that number will jump over five times to $7.6 billion by 2018, which translates to a 38.3 growth rate.
  • North America ad share spending has decreased over the past year, going down from 43.2 percent to 42.3 percent, and by 2016, it’ll go down even further to 40.2 percent. Meanwhile, Asia Pacific will show a slight increase, going from last year’s 28.6 percent to 31 percent in 2016. Western Europe is closely behind, going from 21.6 percent to 23.3 percent in just three years.
  • When it comes to percentage of digital ad spending, the amount was rather low last year at 9.4 percent. However, by 2016, that number will show nearly a seven percent increase, to 16.1 percent.
  • Social ads on Facebook have seen the most increase in rate, rising 54 percent over the last year, mainly due to effectiveness. Meanwhile, the rate for cost-per click search ads also rose, but only by eight percent over the last year.
  • Facebook remains the most preferred social media platform at the moment, with 92 percent of advertisers on board. At a distant second place is social video site YouTube at 35 percent, while Twitter is in third with 23 percent.

 

More statistics can be found in the infographic below.